


Songs For Nomads

by Chamerion



Series: Songs For Nomads [1]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Adventure, F/M, Friendship, Grief/Mourning, Implied/Referenced Torture, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-02
Updated: 2014-10-04
Packaged: 2017-12-31 07:03:49
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 10
Words: 51,080
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1028700
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Chamerion/pseuds/Chamerion
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A Nord mercenary comes home to war, and doubt, and the exquisitely lonely sensation of being a stranger in one's native land. As if that's not enough, she's being asked to save it. Rescuing a single prisoner from the Thalmor ought to be a much simpler task...right?</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Prologue

**Author's Note:**

> _"Home is a notion that only nations of the homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend." --Wallace Stegner_

The Divines have made a fine jest of her, it seems.  
  
When she was a girl, all she wanted was to escape. From what she isn't sure. Skyrim is so vast, but at the time it seemed a cage.  _I want to see cities,_  she told her mother as they embraced.  _I want adventures worthy of a song._  Her mother had smiled tearily.  _Freyja, my fierce one._  
  
Cities she has seen, far larger than Whiterun or even Solitude. The gleaming marble of the Imperial Palace, the hot colors of a Hammerfell market, the teeming back alleys of a hundred places where the people bear strange names and stranger customs. She has lain under strange stars, crept into foreign ruins, has drunk and sweated and fought beside men and women from every corner of Tamriel. She gloried in it like a cat in the sun. And yet in the end, she rushed headlong over the mountains because a man she'd never seen killed a king whose rule she never lived under.  _What village are you from,_  the Stormcloak had asked the thief, and Freyja had pictured the muted oranges and greens of tundra grass, smelled the lavender in the Wind District. And when the sad-eyed legionnaire had apologized -  _at least you'll die here, in your homeland_  - she hadn't disagreed.  
  
She spent her childhood wanting to be more than the daughter of a hunter from Whiterun. Now she is summoned to High Hrothgar like Talos Stormcrown himself, and all she can think to do is run.  
  
She is no dragonslayer out of ancient legend. Experience has taught her to be unflinching in her estimations of her own abilities; whatever happened with that dragon's corpse, Freyja is well aware that she would never have lasted long enough to strike the killing blow without the barrage of arrows from the Whiterun guards. Nor would she have survived Helgen without abundant luck - and a keenly honed sense of when to flee for her life, Nord pride be damned. She's only being practical. Or maybe she's simply being contrary.  _There's no refusing the summons of the Greybeards,_  says Balgruuf, and Freyja walks out of his city without a backward glance.  
  
She strikes a course north and west, as far from the Throat of the World as she can get. Keeps herself in coin by collecting bounties and retrieving lost heirlooms, fetching trinkets for merchants. She pays the bride-price for the restless daughter of an orc chieftain. She stumbles upon a plot to - of all things - summon Queen Potema back from the dead (why even the maddest and thickest of necromancers can't see that this is certain to end poorly is beyond her). She even finds herself briefly imprisoned in Cidhna Mine. She meets hundreds of people; the war is on everyone's lips. It's much the same life she led in Cyrodiil. Yet she never crosses into High Rock, or even Hammerfell, though she has friends in Dragonstar. She tells herself it's because borders have been ill luck for her of late.  
  
 _DOVAHKIIN,_  thunders that summons, at the back of her mind. An invitation, or a challenge. But not for her.


	2. The Push

She's dressing a deer on the cliffs just north of Dragonbridge when she hears raised voices. Freyja drops into a crouch amidst the scrubby conifers, listening. The noise seems to be coming from the road. Bandits don't usually strike in this area - the town guards are nearly within shouting distance - but she slips through the trees to investigate, allowing the pine needles to muffle her stealthy tread.  
  
They're at the crossroads: Thalmor justiciars, a mage and two soldiers in golden armor. And between them a man in filthy rags, hands bound before him. One of the soldiers has him by the collar. The justiciar snarls something into his face, and she watches the prisoner snarl right back, teeth bared.  
  
With gauntleted hand the elf slams a brutal backhand blow across his cheek. The captive staggers, drops to one knee; his bound wrists scrabble in the dirt as he fights to stay upright, head hanging down between his shoulders. One of the elves says something, and then all three of them laugh. Freyja creeps closer. Presses her cheek to the mossy trunk of an ancient pine.  
  
"...your betters," the elf is saying. "Now get up, unless you'd like a more comprehensive lesson."  
  
Freyja can feel her jaw tighten. It's not the first time she's encountered the Thalmor; these days it seems impossible to avoid them, especially in Skyrim. But the strength of her fury surprises her. Perhaps it's only the same simmering restlessness that has dogged her for the past two months, even as she's carved through tombs and bandit camps and Forsworn hideouts. But something makes her slip a dagger into her bracers, and step out from the trees.  
  
The mage spots her first. For a split second, alarm flashes in the justiciar's eyes. "Walk away," he barks, and the other two whirl to look at her. Their prisoner struggles to his feet. Freyja can feel his gaze as well, but she dares not meet his eyes. "What are you doing?" she asks. Steps forward.  
  
"Taking this man to be interrogated," says one of the soldiers, hand on his sword.  
  
Freyja allows herself to move closer, keeps her stance loose and open. Curious, not threatening. A simple hunter startled from the woods. "What has he done?"  
  
"He has knowledge of a cult of Talos. He will tell us what we need to know, or he will die. The choice is his."  
  
She can't keep the antagonism from her tone. "And what right do you have to drag people away like this?"  
  
The elf's face hardens. "By Imperial law banning Talos, we have the right to do whatever we want. And now you'll walk away, if you know what's good for you."  
  
Freyja is in the midst of them, now. She can hear the captive's uneven breathing at her back. Her skin is tingling with anticipation of a fight, but she takes a breath and makes herself shrug. Turns away.  
  
And in the instant when their line of sight is blocked by her body, she slips the dagger from her sleeve and cuts the prisoners' bonds.  
  
"HERE!" She shoves the blade into his hands as the mage shouts in fury, drives an elbow into one of the soldiers' faces, lunges free. Her sword sings as she tears it from its sheath. An elven blade comes whistling down towards her face and she barely throws up her shield in time; the sword hammers against it with a thud and a force that threatens to send her to her knees. Freyja gives ground, recovers her balance, and then the battle begins in earnest.  
  
A blow from her shield sends the Thalmor soldier reeling and she kills him almost immediately, burying her sword in his side when he staggers. The others are not so reckless. They are flanking her by the time she turns from their fallen comrade; Freyja dives behind a tree trunk, tasting lightning as a shock spell sizzles past her. Bits of pine bark fly. She knows from experience that the mage is her most dangerous enemy and breaks into a sprint as she spins free from cover, closing the distance as fast as she can. Another shock spell curls its purple fingers into her armor. Freyja grits her teeth in agony, drops her shoulder, and rams into the taller Mer with all her strength.  
  
The collision staggers them both, but she recovers first. A vicious cut to his shoulder makes the Thalmor mage scream in fury. The fireball he unleashes forces Freyja to cower behind her shield with the smoky, bitter scent of burning leather in her nose; she charges blind, hears the breath go out of him when they crash together again. Ducks out from behind her shield just in time to yelp and dodge the knife that he produces from inside his sleeve. As he raises his hands for another spell she stuns him with a shield-blow, presses her advantage, gets a fist to the mouth, slashes again. The strike shatters the ward he's thrown up - and her next one finds his heart.  
  
Freyja can taste blood. Sweat is coursing down her neck, hair straggling into her eyes; the battle-fury is pounding through her veins. The prisoner is fending off the last of his captors, retreating steadily, keeping the elf at arm's length with wild slashes from the dagger. She sees him arch his spine and jerk desperately back as the sword slices toward his unprotected stomach. Freyja slams the hilt of her own sword against her shield, screaming. "COME ON!"  
  
The Thalmor soldier rises to her challenge. He charges with shield raised, howling about the superiority of Mer; the clash of their swords clicks her teeth together and rings his golden armor like a bell. They circle, slashing, blocking. He tries to sweep her legs from under her. Freyja springs back and it is his turn to sneer a challenge. "Behold the future!" he says. "Behold--"  
  
And then the prisoner steps up behind him and opens his throat.  
  
Freyja stutters to a halt, sword arm still raised. The elf crumples into the grass. For a moment they stare at each other over his twitching body.  
  
"Thanks," Freyja finally pants.  
  
"Least I could do," he gasps.  
  
The only sound is the stirring of the mountain breeze in the tops of the pines. The corpse of the Thalmor mage is lying facedown in a clump of flowers. A butterfly settles beside him. It's eerily still after the ferocity of battle.  
  
Then the newly freed prisoner sucks a breath between his teeth and sits down hard, clutching his left hand. Blood gushes over his wrist. "Divines!" Freyja curses, leaping back into action. She kneels beside him, pries open his fingers. It looks like he turned a sword cut with his hand. The palm is laid open, down to clean white bone.  
  
"Off," she barks, pointing at his shirt. Within seconds she is tearing strips of cloth from the otherwise useless garment, wrapping them brutally tight around the wound. She squeezes the bandage and feels him flinch, picks up his other hand and guides it on top of hers. "Hold it there," she says, and looks up at him to be sure he understands.  
  
He is watching her intently, pain mingling with a sort of mute wonder in his expression. His eyes are green. His face is only inches from her own. Freyja is abruptly conscious of his broad bare chest, his hands cradled between both of hers. "Hold it  _tightly_ ," she orders, a little shakily. He nods. She drops his hands.  
  
Freyja eyes the enemy corpses, businesslike. The second soldier is the largest of the three; she glances at her new acquaintance's wide Nord shoulders and begins to strip the dead elf out of his armor. "Might be tight," she says, dropping it in a pile, "but it'll have to do." She reaches for his good hand, pulls him to his feet. Moves to pick up her shield. He stops her with a tight grip. "Eitri," he murmurs.  
  
She hesitates, and then clasps his hand in return. "Freyja."  
  
"Honored," he says. "I am in your debt, Freyja shield-maiden."  
  
"Not for long if we run into another Thalmor patrol," she says. "Their embassy isn't far - and that wound needs attention."  
  
"Aye." He lets her buckle him into the cuirass, diligently maintaining pressure on his bleeding hand. "I'm a stranger here - is it safe, that town to the south?"  
  
"Dragonbridge? I'd rather not chance it. Imperial guards have no love for the justiciars, but if the Thalmor find these corpses it's the first place they'll look. A wounded man in elven armor won't be hard to spot." She glances up. The clouds-edges are flushing rose in the late afternoon light; Eitri's reddish hair is beginning to gleam like fire. "I know a cave where we can shelter for the night."  
  
They take the northwest road and then cut quickly into the trees, away from prying eyes. Just south of Clearpine Pond the ground rises to a crown of stony hills, and beneath one of them is a deep overhang under a brow of rock. Freyja approaches cautiously – she killed a bear here, once – but there are no predators lying in wait. A few old deer bones lie scattered near the back wall, but the silty floor has not been disturbed in weeks.  
  
Eitri staggers up behind her and sits, a graceless crumbling of the knees. He's far too pale. Freyja shrugs off her pack and lays down her shield, though not her sword. Takes his hand again. He starts at the touch, and Freyja grimaces at the state of his wrists. The Thalmor did not tie him gently; his skin is scrubbed raw, even bloody in places, where the ropes chafed against it. She tries to avoid worsening the damage as she unwinds the makeshift bandage.  
  
"By the  _Nine_ ," she breathes. The wound looks even worse without the oozing blood to cover it. She can see the layers of skin and muscle, the yellow fibers, the terrible white gleam of bone. Eitri's last two fingers are drooping unnaturally toward his palm. The slightest movement makes him wince and curl inward, forehead shimmering with sweat. Bottles chink as Freyja upends her pack; she yanks up the strongest healing potion she has and shoves it at him. "Drink this." He doesn't argue. There's something desperate in the working of his throat as he gulps it down. Freyja rubs at her eyes.  
  
She used to fight with a Dunmeri spellsword named Indros, a quick clever pragmatist with a wicked blade and a wickeder tongue. Freyja misses him now with an intensity that takes her breath away. When it comes to spells she is clumsy at best and useless at worst. She pushes another bottle into Eitri's hand, and then another. After he's downed the last of her potions she cocks her head at him. "Better?"  
  
"I can feel my fingers," he says, twitching them; his face pales at the motion. He scrapes up a grey smile. "Though I'm not sure that's an improvement."  
  
"If you're making jokes, you're going to live." Freyja pushes herself to her feet. "Stay here. I'm going for water before it's dark."  
  
She fills her skins at the pond, fetching an armload of kindling and a handful of wispy blue flowers for good measure. When she returns Eitri is slumped against a rock near the front of the cave with the dying sun on his face. His eyes are closed. He looks exhausted; he doesn't even hear her approach. An impressive bruise is swelling where the Thalmor soldier struck him. There are circles beneath his eyes, hungry hollows in his cheeks. Freyja wonders when his captors last fed him. Wonders who he is, this stranger she took it upon herself to rescue. If he had not volunteered it she would not even know his name.  
  
She studies him. He has a wide, bony face, more rugged than handsome: long nose, deepset eyes, thick brows. A full, serious mouth. His beard is scrubby and short and redder than the hair on his head, which is the evening gold of ripe wheat.  
  
It's a compelling face, if not an overly striking one. And he has the muscled shoulders of - a woodcutter? A farmer? Not a warrior. He defended himself well enough under the circumstances - he's still alive, after all - but not as a trained fighter would have.  
  
He stirs. Freyja flushes with the realization that she is staring, and strides briskly forward before he can catch her at it. This time he hears her and opens his eyes. "Hungry?" Freyja asks.  
  
" _Gods_ ," he says, and starts building the fire, which she takes as a yes. She gathers more wood as he constructs a neat pile of kindling, and by the time she returns the moon is rising and the cave's roof is lit from below with a flicker of orange. Eitri is crouched in front of it, warming his hands; he's discarded the ill-fitting elven armor. Freyja tosses him the bear pelt that she uses on top of her bedroll and he settles back on his haunches as she feeds the fire. Much of the wood is pine, throwing showers of sparks and resinous smoke. Soon they're both scooting backward as it blazes up. Eitri's breath comes in sharp white puffs, but the bearskin hangs loosely around his shoulders, exposing the solid planes of his chest.  _I really am in Skyrim_ , Freyja thinks, with a smile. Indros had possessed an arsenal of snide remarks about her tendency to stand outside bare-armed on cool nights.  
  
She has a handful of bruised apples and the meat that she managed to carve off the deer before being interrupted. It cooks quickly over the fire, which is just as well; the first rich smells of venison make Eitri shift in his seat, and he tears into the first strip of meat so ravenously that the juices run over his chin. Freyja nearly follows his example. She's traveled far today, and the slightly charred meat leaves her wanting to lick her fingers. They fall into an easy rhythm, without the need for words - Eitri munches apples and roasts a new batch of venison while she eats, and then she takes over as he tries, with limited success, not to chew like a man who hasn't been fed in three days. By the end they're both nursing burned fingers. Freyja pulls out a bottle of mead and Eitri falls backward, head pillowed on his arms, shaking with deep, incredulous chuckles.  
  
"You," he says, "are a vision of Sovngarde."  
  
"That's all I have," she warns him.  
  
" _Sovngarde_ ," he repeats. He's still lying on the floor of the cave, boneless and satisfied, smiling broadly. It's the first real smile she's seen from him. They pass the bottle back and forth like old comrades, fingers brushing, savoring their sips in companionable silence. It goes quickly, with two. Afterward Freyja sets water to boil and pulls out her spare tunic, starts tearing it into strips. Gestures at Eitri's hand.  
  
"Let's see it."  
  
His smile fades immediately, but he holds out his left arm, elbow resting on his knee. The potions have done their work. The wound is partially closed, no longer gaping like a crooked mouth, but it's still terrible to look at: a wicked slice along the outside of his hand, curving from bony wrist up into the meat of his palm, deep and ragged and red. Eitri's last two fingers are still unnaturally limp. Freyja pulls the water off the coals and tosses a handful of the blue mountain flowers in to steep, finishes ripping up her tunic. In a moment the cave is full of a sharp green smell. She dips one of the rags into the hot water. The wool is rough, but clean, and she tries to bathe his hand with as much gentleness as possible, though Eitri still closes his eyes and bites down hard on his lip. Freyja does not realize that she is humming as she works until his sad, ragged singing joins her.  
  
"We drink to our youth, to days come and gone..."  
  
The man is certainly no skald. His song is closer to a whisper than a tune, but it is so hoarse with loss and longing that it stirs her as few bards ever have. "What village are you from?" she asks, softly.  
  
"Ivarstead." His voice takes on the warm, rough tones of southeastern Skyrim when he says it, grainy as honey-colored planks. Freyja looks at his rough-hewn face, his autumn-bright hair, and decides that the Rift would suit him.  
  
"You grew up there?"  
  
"I've lived there my whole life."  
  
She can't imagine that. It must show on her face, because Eitri smiles. "Aye, it's a sleepy little place. Pretty, though. Most of the young folk leave for Riften or someplace when they come of age. I guess I never got around to it."  
  
"You're a farmer, then?"  
  
For a long moment he doesn't say anything. Then he looks down at his hands. "A smith."  
  
Freyja's stomach pitches. She glances to the wound that she is wrapping, the way his fingers crook inward. His voice is strained. "Not much call for a Warmaiden's," he continues, doggedly, "but farmers need tools, and the guards brought their weapons for repair from time to time. I made a decent living."  
  
Divines, no wonder he looks so morose. She's bandaging up the end of his livelihood. Freyja swallows.  _It may yet heal_ , she wants to tell him, but she only presses her thumb to the warm, undamaged skin on the back of his hand.  
  
The fire crackles and pops, starting to settle into a mound of red coals. The light catches on the contours of his face, creates a puzzle of hard shadows and soft orange light. Freyja crushes the few remaining flowers and tucks them into the bandage. Ties it off. "The Rift is Stormcloak territory," she finally says. "How did you come to be a Thalmor prisoner?"  
  
"My cousin disappeared one night, about two months ago. Some said the Thalmor grabbed him." Eitri picks up a stone, worries over its smooth surface. Bites his lip. "My parents died when I was just a lad, and my aunt and uncle took me in. Brokkr and I were like brothers. At first I thought he'd gone to join the Stormcloaks - he was always the headstrong one. But it didn't make sense. I know him; he couldn't keep something like that to himself. He'd have told someone. He'd have told  _me_." He shakes his head. "I was in Falkreath, looking for him. Asked too many questions, I guess. They ambushed me on the way to Riverwood. Accused me of being a known Talos worshipper. I tried to...well. It was a short fight."  
  
"You took on a pack of justiciars?"  
  
"Oh, aye - I fought them off with a hammer. Unfortunately it was the hammer I use at the forge."  
  
She snorts. Her laughter seems to please him; a smile stretches the stiff bruise on his right cheek. "I'm surprised they didn't kill you," says Freyja, sobering.  
  
Eitri's face tightens. "They wanted information," he says, and then changes the subject. "What about you - where are you from?"  
  
Freyja sighs. "Whiterun, I suppose. It's been ten years since I really lived there."  
  
"You've been here in Haafingar?"  
  
"No - Cyrodiil. Hammerfell too, for a long while, and a stint in Morrowind."  
  
He whistles. "So you're not a Stormcloak, then?"  
  
Freyja purses her lips, amused. "Do I look like a Stormcloak to you?"  
  
"You look like a Nord."  
  
She does - tall, grey-eyed, painted in a riot of freckles by the southern sun, with that fine cornsilk hair that floats free no matter how tightly she braids it. "There's plenty of Nords in the Legion," she says, sharply.  
  
"And you swear by the Nine."  
  
That gives her pause. Freyja thinks back, then grimaces ruefully. "Only when I'm off my guard."  
  
"You haven't answered my question."  
  
In truth she crossed the border with vague intentions of joining the war, indignant over the sudden upheaval in her home. But things are not so clear as that. When men in Cyrodiil spoke of Ulfric Stormcloak as a traitor they failed to mention that he had killed his king in a formal duel - and while Freyja is a wanderer, she has not forgotten the ancient customs of her native land. The Jarl of Windhelm may well be a cold bastard, but he is no murderer under the laws of Skyrim.  
  
Whether he is guilty of the lives cut short in a war of his making, of course, is another matter. In escaping Helgen, Freyja threw her lot in with the man who had not been participating in her execution. But that hardly meant she was ready to throw in with his cause. She was only a girl when the Great War ended, but she remembers her father wearing the uniform of the Legion. And he took pride in it, even after all that happened. He taught her how to wield a sword; she's not certain she could bring herself to raise one against the armor that he kept so lovingly folded at the bottom of his wooden chest.  
  
And yet she also remembers her mother bundling her into a fur-lined cloak and slipping out of Whiterun, remembers how the stars appeared in the clear, cold dusk as they hurried hand-in-hand over the tundra, up into the foothills. The soft glow of the torch under the cliff, the statue's stone eyes glinting. The way her mother knelt and brushed back her hair.  _It is more than just tradition, Freyja,_  she had said, gazing earnestly into her eyes.  _I hope you can understand that. When a man accepts injustice because it is the safer road, then he has made himself a slave._  
  
Of course, her mother's defiance of injustice had been in furtive visits to a Talos statue, not in joining a rebellion. Freyja hasn't the faintest idea what she would say about the war, if she were still alive. Perhaps her mother would be as torn as she is.  
  
"No," she says. "I'm not a Stormcloak."  
  
"What are you, then?"  
  
That's the question, isn't it? Not a Stormcloak; not a Legionnaire. Not a foreigner, but not really a native, not anymore. Not - well. "Just a sellsword," Freyja says.  
  
He frowns. "And you went out of your way to pick a fight with the Thalmor?"  
  
"You can't put a price on some things."  
  
That makes him laugh. "You're a strange woman."  
  
"You should get out of Ivarstead more often."  
  
"Perhaps I should," he says, strangely intense. Then his smile fades. "It's not as though I can just go home, now."  
  
And he can't. Not with the Thalmor hunting for him. Not to a forge he can no longer use. "What will you do?" Freyja asks.  
  
He shrugs, brooding. "Brokkr's still missing."  
  
That is not the answer she was expecting. "Are you mad? It'll be weeks before that hand heals - how do you expect to travel quickly? Or fight, if it comes to that? And the Thalmor will be looking for you, now. Do you want to make their job  _easier?_ "  
  
He cocks his head at her. His voice is very quiet. "And who else will look, if I do not?"  
  
She ought to dissuade him. He is one man. One blacksmith, who has spent nearly his entire life in the hold where he was born. His wisest course now would be to join up with the Stormcloaks - or flee to Hammerfell, better still. Yet.  _Who else?_  he asked, and it was not bravado, but the truth. Not  _Victory or Sovngarde_. Not  _True Nords never back down_. His is the kind of courage that does not know it's brave, because it never even sees another option. She must be growing soft; it makes her want to weep.  
  
"Where do you plan to start?" she asks.  
  
"I don't know," he says - so softly. "I don't even - I think he's dead."  
  
"Don't say that!" Freyja snarls, surprising even herself. Eitri's eyes fly up to her face, wide and wild and dark. The firelight glints in his lashes. Then he kisses her.  
  
It's sudden, desperate, marred by a clack of teeth. The grip of his good hand is almost painful in her hair. And yet he kisses like a man robbed of language, slow and aching and raw as a wound. Tender, but somehow savage; Freyja can taste his heart in his mouth.  
  
His other hand comes up to cup her jaw - and then he huffs a pained breath against her lips, pulls back. The shock of contact with his bandaged palm seems to have sobered him. He blinks, shakes his head. "Sorry," he says, "I--"  
  
Freyja surges forward, silencing him with another bruising kiss. For a moment he is still and then he seizes her by the waist, clutching at her armor. The leather creaks. The bearskin slips from his shoulders; Freyja flattens a palm against his chest. Smoothes it down as though spreading open a map, feeling the hard contours of the terrain beneath her fingers, following the trail of hair down between his hips. He swallows a ragged gasp, and it burns in her eyes like the smoke of the fire. She barely knows him. She wants to crawl inside him: this man with his hopeless cause, this man who cannot go home.  
  
He's tugging at buckles, clumsy, one-handed, still kissing her like a prayer against disaster. When he ducks his head to mouth slow and hot at the crook of her neck she starts to help him. It's only fair - he's already bare but for a pair of ragged trousers. Their fingers tangle frantically in their haste, knuckles barking against leather, but soon she's down to her wool undertunic and Eitri is pulling her onto his lap, against the sturdy framework of his chest. The back of his bandaged hand skims up her thigh. Freyja grips him by the shoulders, explores his back and arms. The muscles there are coiled and heavy as ship's cables.  
  
Now that her armor is gone he slows, rocking back to rake her over with his eyes. The flare of pleasure there sends little tendrils of heat to curl and bloom deep in her chest. She's still wearing her boots and bracers, and he pulls her right hand to him, fiddling with the laces at her wrist. With little use of one limb he's painfully awkward, and Freyja reaches to do it herself - then hisses when he seals his mouth over the heel of her hand, breath and tongue hot against her palm, teeth nibbling at the thin skin. She swallows and finishes removing her bracers as he turns her hand over, contemplating the scars on her knuckles. He tastes those, too.  
  
Freyja can feel the blazing, rigid length of him beneath her. Growing impatient, she sets a thumb in wheel-rut of his hipbone, slips it beneath the waist of his trousers. His thighs twitch. His palm fits itself against her hip and turns feral, bunching her tunic higher around her waist. Freyja ducks in to nip at his lower lip.  
  
With a growl he shoves her back, reaching behind him for the crumpled bearskin and spreading it flat beside the fire. Freyja admires the predatory working of his muscled back as she tugs off her tunic and boots. The way his exhale smokes in the cold when he turns and catches sight of her again. He spreads his palm over her breastbone and presses her back onto the makeshift blanket, kneeling beside her.  
  
He has fine hands. Large and calloused, with short blunt nails - yet there is something sure and graceful in the pads of his long fingers and the way they settle on her skin, firm as pebbles, light as snowflakes.  _Craftsman's hands,_  she thinks. Slowly, experimentally, he thumbs her collarbone, the line of her throat. She shivers.  
  
When he unwinds her breastband and lowers his head Freyja squeezes her eyes shut, fingers tangling in his hair. Pants under his glowing mouth, the purr of his beard against her skin. He keeps his left hand resting on her neck, over her pulse; Freyja wonders if he can feel it. Wonders, idly, if the thumping life beneath his palm might have the power to flow into the torn skin, and offer healing. Bucks, and cries out, when he pulls back and his breath ghosts over the dampness on her breasts.  
  
She opens her eyes to a man who does not look healed: his jaw is locked, his eyes crinkled shut as though in pain. It makes her clutch his hair and pull his head down, draw his tongue fiercely into her mouth. Freyja lets a small, needy sound flutter in her throat, lets him feel it vibrate against his palm, and he groans like a man dying; for one convulsive second his hand tightens around her neck.  
  
She chases that sound as hard as she's ever hunted anything in her life, sliding her hands beneath his clothing, dragging his trousers down his hips. By the time she finds it again her own smallclothes are gone and he has rolled to cover her body with his own, supporting himself on one trembling arm.  
  
He can't sustain it for long. When he collapses down onto his elbows the breath goes out of her. He's not a small man, but even so he's heavier than he looks. Made of iron and earth. Freyja squirms a little, enjoying his warm weight and the way he shudders when she moves against him. "Tell me what you want," he breathes, and she looks up, questioning.  
  
"Isn't that how it goes, in the bards' tales? The mighty warrior saves the maiden from certain death, and then it's  _kind sir, how can I possibly repay you?_ " He laughs at himself easily, painlessly; she likes that. "I never thought to be the maiden."  
  
She reaches for him, smiling darkly. "You are no maiden." The proof is hot beneath her fingers. His breath stutters and she pulls him to her, like lightning to the earth.  
  
He chokes and tenses and fights himself, eyelids quivering. Her head falls back. In the stillness and the silence she is almost too aware, every sensation like a needleprick. The coarse soft fur of the bearskin beneath her, the night wind fluttering in both their hair, the scarlet glow of the fire limning one side of his face. Over his shoulder she can see the stars like gleaming sword points in the blue-black sky. "Move," she growls.  
  
He moves like a river - with a steady, devouring power, a smooth ferocity. The driving force of him presses her so deeply into the bearskin that she can feel the tiny stones and divots in the ground beneath. Freyja batters herself against it, clutching at his back, barely keeping above the plunging current. Then she lets it take her. Lets him roll over her, drowns and gasps for air and drowns once more, surges with him to break like a wave again and again and again - and then fall away, in a tumble of white sound.

* * *

The next morning Freyja startles to wake beside another body, rolls out from beneath his arm before she remembers how it got there. He doesn't stir. One corner of her mouth ticks up fondly. The clear morning reveals all of the bruises and dirt on his skin, but Eitri looks less drawn in sleep, less like a blade rusted down to a ragged shadow of itself.  
  
The ashes of their fire were cold hours before. Freyja doesn't bother to start it again, merely pulls on her clothes and buckles her armor. She eats a strip of last night's venison with her fingers, follows it down with the icy water in her skins. Settles back against the stone wall of the cave. Above the hills, the sky is a wash of palest blue. She can hear the sweet hollow trill of a thrush somewhere in the forest.  
  
The bird or the breeze - or the hum of her thoughts - wakes her companion. Eitri sits up, drawing the bearskin around his hips. He glimpses her, strapped back into her armor, and offers a tentative smile. They're both strangely shy in the light of the morning. "Hungry?" Freyja asks, voice still husky with sleep.  
  
That seems to put him at ease; he scoots closer, reaching out to take the cold meat and the last of her apples. He trades her a firmer smile in return. While he breakfasts - like a civilized person, this time - Freyja contemplates the forest in silence.  
  
"What are you thinking?" Eitri murmurs, finally.  
  
She bites her lip.  
  
"Freyja?" He sounds concerned.  
  
"Just making travel plans," she says, breaking out of her reverie.  
  
His face relaxes. "I never asked what you were doing, before you got distracted with saving my life."  
  
"Nothing of consequence. I'm between jobs."  
  
"And what do you plan to do, now?"  
  
Freyja takes a deep, slow breath, still looking out over the tops of the hills. "First," she says, "I'm going to climb down to Dragonbridge and find you something to wear that doesn't scream  _escaped Thalmor prisoner_. Then we're going to find a mage."  
  
"What do we need a mage for?"  
  
"Your hand, fool."  
  
He looks mildly alarmed. "You've already--"  
  
"Do you ever want to forge steel again?" Eitri opens his mouth, then closes it sharply. For the barest instant he looks frightened, and Freyja curbs her tongue. "We're going to find a mage," she says more softly, laying a hand on his arm. "And then we're going to find your cousin."  
  
His lips part. The look he gives her is raw, incredulous.  _Naked,_  she thinks, far more so than she saw him last night. It's too intimate. She looks away. "You would...why...?"  
  
"Why not?"  
  
"People don't just - just stop what they do and--"  
  
"This is what I do," she reminds him. "Delving into crypts, finding lost relatives. I get hired for that sort of thing all the time."  
  
His voice is soft. "But I can't pay you."  
  
"Elven armor fetches a fine price," Freyja quips.  
  
Eitri gives her a long, hard look. He appears to have a host of further questions, but after a moment he shuts his gaping mouth. "Thank you," he says, simply.  
  
Freyja stands, stretches. Her fingers tap a brisk rhythm against the stone wall of the cave. She looks east over the crags, over Dragonbridge hidden below them, over the Karth River and the mountains beyond. One way or another they'll discover what happened to his cousin, and then she'll deliver him back to Ivarstead.  
  
 _And then,_  she thinks,  _I'm going to climb a mountain._


	3. Solitude

It’s mid-morning by the time Freyja returns from Dragonbridge with a simple set of farmer’s clothes, and Solitude is nearly a full day’s walk. Eitri protests when he realizes where they’re headed. “The Thalmor are headquartered in Solitude – even I know that.”  
  
Freyja shrugs. “In theory. But they don’t like sharing Castle Dour with the Legion any more than the Legion likes sharing it with them. All the times I’ve been in Solitude, I’ve seen maybe two or three justiciars. Besides, we’re not going to walk in the front gate. There’s another way in.”  
  
His brows shoot up. “Into Solitude?”  
  
“There’s a passage under the cliff – not hard to find if you know it’s there.”  
  
“Don’t they know there’s a war on? Why haven’t they blocked it off?”  
  
“That’s exactly why they haven’t blocked it off. If the city were under siege they could use it to lead a sortie out behind enemy lines, and it’s a good escape route to the harbor, if it came to that. Besides, you couldn’t bring an army through there, they’d be massacred. And whatever you care to believe about Ulfric Stormcloak, I get the impression that hired assassins aren’t his style – too subtle.” She shrugs again. “They do keep it locked, but you don’t spend ten years fetching family heirlooms out of bandit camps without learning how to pick a lock. It’ll be past nightfall by the time we make it to the city. With any luck, the only person who remembers your face will be the healer, even if the Thalmor do come searching.”  
  
Eitri agrees, reluctantly, and they set off. Freyja steers them quickly away from the road. She’s no desire to meet any more Thalmor patrols, so they follow the steep slope of the land downhill, toward the Karth River. It's her favorite kind of traveling weather: clear and bright, with the teeth of autumn in it. There's a breeze in the river valley, but the sun is hot after a night spent in the foothills of the mountains.  
  
“So how did you find this secret passage?” Eitri asks.  
  
“It pays to remember old stories, now and again. High King Erling had it built for discreet business with a privateer.” Freyja grins. “What kind of business is up for debate.”  
  
Eitri smiles, rakes his fingers through his hair. It’s a sweaty, dusty mess, filled with the grime of a forced march across miles of rough Skyrim roads, and he succeeds only in making it stand on end. But something about the motion calls up a vivid sense-memory of those fingers running over her skin. Freyja flushes.  
  
She's no idea what made her fall into bed so readily with a man she barely knows, even now. It's true she felt his story like an exquisite ache in every bone, but she's heard a lot of sad stories in her life; everyone in Skyrim seems to have one, these days. A daughter lost in battle, a Markarth father trampled in the lord's game of greed and power, an uncle caught between two sides of a war and crushed as it ground into motion, like a glacier marching toward the sea. Was it mere loneliness? The sudden camaraderie, the closeness within the warm ring of the fire's light? The world seems very open in the sun, and their huddle of raw emotion and clashing bodies very foolish. Yes, she was impressed by his simple courage, but she's known plenty of brave men - in far less intimate physical detail.  
  
It had been, she reflects, a very long time. The thought prompts a twinge of guilt - she did not give herself to Indros so freely, and he was far more than a chance acquaintance - but perhaps it's as simple as that. At any rate it won't happen again. She has learned her lesson about sleeping with traveling companions.  
  
“Right,” she says, to arrest that line of thought. “Your cousin – how did he go missing?”  
  
Eitri drags at his hair again. “Brokkr’s a hunter by trade. We work together a lot, actually: he sells me pelts at a discount, I fix up his gear for free, that sort of thing. A few times a year he heads into the city to trade. Falkreath, usually. It’s smaller than Riften, but it’s about the same distance, and there’s less chance of losing your coin purse – plus he was sweet on a girl there. He was late getting back, but I didn’t think much of it. Good hunting between there and Ivarstead, and sometimes there are snowstorms in the pass."  
  
"What changed your mind?"  
  
"Helgen," he says. "You know about Helgen, right?"

Freyja feels a chill. "Mm," she says, noncommittally. "Hard to believe."

"I wouldn't believe it myself, but I passed by on my way over the mountains. It was still smoking." His voice is hushed. "Even the ground was hot - like the fire was still burning itself out, underneath. Like something out of a nightmare.  _Dragons_." He shakes his head. "When I heard I was afraid he'd been caught up in that somehow, so I went looking. But it was when I got to Falkreath that things started to look bad. As soon as I asked after him the innkeeper threw a fit. Said he'd left in the middle of the night, and without paying his tab."

Freyja frowns. "And you thought it was the Thalmor? Why?"

"I didn't know what to think. At first I thought he might've joined up with Ulfric - he was always claiming the man had the right idea - but he wouldn't have left without telling me, and cheating the innkeeper isn't like him. I tried to find if she knew where he might've gone, but she just grumbled that she'd had enough of pinchpenny customers to last her a lifetime. And when I asked her what she meant, she said there'd been a Thalmor agent spending a lot of time there, claiming he was on official business and refusing to pay. 'Drank plenty of mead, too, for someone who thought he was so above us all,' she said. 'He left me high and dry about the same time your cousin did, but I say good riddance to bad rubbish. At least he's not scaring off my business anymore.'"

That, Freyja can agree, does not sound good.

“The thing about Brokkr – he’s been known to shoot off his mouth,” Eitri says. “Soon as I heard that I had a bad feeling. Started asking around. Turns out Inga, the girl he’s sweet on? She’s missing too, and the reason no one’s gone looking is because everyone thinks they ran off together. Not many noticed – she was a hunter as well, only came into town for supplies – but the other huntsmen just assumed they’d gone to Riften and got married. Well, I knew damned well they hadn’t, because I’d have heard no end of that plan. Even if they decided on the spur of the moment, I would have heard something by then.” Eitri shakes his head. “That’s when the priest of Arkay pulls me aside and tells me Inga’s mother died three months past, and she was upset because they couldn’t have a traditional funeral.”

“With offerings to all the gods,” Freyja murmurs, catching on immediately.

“Exactly. And then he looks around and whispers, ‘Now that I know she’s missing, I’m terribly worried. You haven’t any reason to trust me, but there’s a shrine on the south shore of Lake Ilinalta.”

“Did you find it?”

“Oh, I found it.” Eitri looks pained. “Found two bodies, too – Inga, or at least I assume it was Inga, and the justiciar who caught them making their offering. He had a letter in his pocket from one of his superiors. Apparently he’d been looking for the shrine for quite a while; they were just unlucky enough to be there when he finally found it.”

“But no sign of your cousin?”

Eitri swallows. “Traces of an old blood trail,” he says. “That’s all. Riverwood was the closest town, so I headed that way. That’s when the Thalmor grabbed me. They must have put two and two together just like I did, and come looking.”

"I still can't believe they didn't kill you."

"I think they would have," he says. "But they found the letter. I had it on me. A Thalmor agent goes missing while searching for a Talos shrine, and a Nord prisoner turns up with his orders in his pocket - it wasn't hard for them to guess I knew where it was. They tried to beat it out of me, but by that point I was so worried about Brokkr that I was too angry to tell them a damned thing. So they said if I wouldn't explain how I'd come by a piece of the First Emissary's personal correspondence, I could visit the Embassy and return her property in person." Freyja winces. Eitri shrugs. "They dragged me halfway across Skyrim, and then you showed up."

Freyja bites her cheek, thinking. "Your cousin, though," she says. "If he wasn’t at the shrine, and the Thalmor hadn’t found it…he could’ve gotten away.”

“That’s what I hoped, at first.” Eitri shakes his head. “But there was something they said.  _If the other one won’t talk, maybe this one will._  I’ve had a lot of time to think it over, and I don’t know who that would be, if not Brokkr. And they were looking for me by name. They had their weapons out as soon as they laid eyes on me. Why else would they be so eager to arrest me, if not because I’d been asking after him?”

It’s a fair point, but Freyja’s not sure where that leaves them. Nor, she realizes, does she actually know what the Thalmor do with their captured prisoners, except that it likely involves a grisly end. Security at their embassy is tighter than a miser’s purse strings; their headquarters in Solitude is too small and too close to the full strength of the Legion to hold a host of unlucky Talos worshippers, and – as she’s already explained – it’s not exactly a bustling hub of activity. The justiciars are rightly feared for their skill at making men vanish without a trace, but where do they vanish  _to_?

She can think of several ways to find out, but none of them sound appealing.

As the day wears on they follow the river north, watching it broaden from a quick, mountain-fed torrent to a channel nearly half a mile across. The ferns and spruces crowding its banks give way to patches of open marshland where hawks drift overhead. Occasionally one plunges toward the water to rise with a thrashing salmon gripped tightly in its claws. By the time the sun sinks behind the mountains Freyja and Eitri are clambering over a rocky shoreline, and the cold air seeping up the riverbed sometimes carries a whiff of salt.

Masser and Secunda are slung low in the sky when Freyja finally hears the telltale creak and splash of a sawmill. A breeze stirs the pines around them. Freyja pushes a branch aside and beckons with the torch. “Solitude,” she murmurs.

The capital towers above them, a silhouette of high black walls against the deep blue twilight, torches trailing in the wind like red banners. A few stars wink on the horizon, beneath the great prow of the crag. At the end of its span the Blue Palace glitters. Eitri doesn’t say a word, but he cranes his neck up at the arch and whistles, soft and low.

They hurry along the waterfront, past the East Empire Company’s warehouse and a party of dockworkers straggling home late, talking eagerly of the tavern. A single lantern hung beside the road forms an island of ghostly light, and just beyond it Freyja snuffs out the torch and steps into the weeds beside the road. She feels her way over the rocks. Finally she finds a crevice in the cliff face, just big enough for a man to slip through, but soon it widens and reveals a battered wooden door.

A long tunnel sloping upward, a set of jagged steps, and then a passage of stone that has been cut and mortared rather than hewn, stairs built in an elegant spiral rather than hacked into solid rock. When they reach the ground level of the tower light flickers outside – a guard on patrol. Freyja waits for him to pass by and then pads quietly down the hallway. A moment later the lock gives a well-oiled pop and they step into the fine, cool night air of Solitude. Conveniently, their destination is just down the street. In six strides Freyja is tucked around a corner with Eitri close behind her, rapping at the door to the Hall of the Dead.

Styrr has a book in hand when he opens it; he looks as though he’s been enjoying a quiet evening by the fire. “May we come in?” Freyja murmurs.

“Of course!” says the priest, as soon as he’s gotten over his surprise. “Of course, my child, what a pleasant surprise. All of Solitude owes you a debt after that terrible Potema business. And who is your friend?”

“He injured his hand,” says Freyja, carefully. She knows Styrr petitioned for Roggvir to have a proper Nord burial after the execution, but that might speak more to the man’s kindly nature than to his political sympathies. He’s certainly not going to turn them over to the Thalmor, but he might refuse to help them. “I’d have taken him to Angeline’s for a good strong potion, but it’s late, and the shops are closed.”

“A healer can do more good than a potion, at any rate,” the old man says, carefully marking his place in the book and laying it down. He gestures to a chair in the corner, and Eitri sits while Styrr gathers his own supplies, lining them up on the low table with the methodical grace of a man practiced at his profession. When he unwinds the bandage, however, the priest stills. "Where did you get this?"

"I – had an accident at the forge. The--"

Immediately Styrr draws back, face hardening. "I know what a cut from a sword looks like, young man," he says, with a trace of anger. “Why did you really come to my door so late in the evening?”

"You're a fair man,” says Freyja. “A healer. What does it matter how he got it?"

"Of course it matters!"

"You said Solitude owed me a debt," Freyja presses. "I had hoped you included yourself."

It's a ruthless blow, and the old man sags under it. His hands rub weary circles at his temples. "Of course," he says. "I - of course. I'm sure you have your reasons. I simply don't want to find that I've helped a fugitive escape the dungeons."

"You won't."

"I have your word?"

"On my honor as a warrior," she says. “He’s done nothing wrong.”

Styrr sighs. "I never had reason to doubt it in our brief dealings – I suppose that will have to be enough. Let me see it, son."

As he starts to prod at Eitri’s hand, Freyja ducks back towards the doorway. “I’m getting dinner,” she says. “I won’t be long.”

Outside, however, she doesn’t head for the inn. Instead, with a quick deep breath and the sedate pace of someone who has every right to be there, she points her feet up the hill and strolls into the courtyard of Castle Dour. She climbs the stairs, takes a turn around the ramparts, gets a feel for the rhythm of the patrols. Then, without allowing herself to fully contemplate her actions, she slips a lockpick into the door of the Thalmor Headquarters.

_What in the name of Aedra and Daedra are you doing, Freyja?_ she thinks, in the distinctly Dunmeri tones that her inner voice always takes when she's being an idiot. It's an old argument.  _Are you trying to get yourself killed?_  Indros would rage.  _You're already going to die centuries too early, the least you could do is not charge into every battle screaming "Victory or Sovngarde" before you've had a chance to size up the odds._  She used to tease him for it.  _I'd say you sound like my mother, but she has more guts than you._

_I'm not going to be in Sovngarde, in case you've forgotten,_  he'd scowled once. That had put a stop to her teasing.

_But I'm not the one who died too soon, am I?_  Freyja thinks viciously, and then stifles that line of thought. Her current position is literally the last place in Tamriel for indulging in pointless reminiscence.

It seems to take forever; the squeak of the pick seems loud enough to wake the entire city. When she finally closes the door behind her Freyja presses her back against it and takes a moment to breathe. Waits until she can listen for footsteps without the distraction of her own heartbeat thudding in her ears. She feels like a green youth preparing to collect her first bounty, not a warrior approaching her thirtieth year.  _As well you should,_  barks that snide inner voice.  _The Thalmor are not some half-wit crew of incompetent bandits._

As it turns out, however, her fear is baseless. The place is empty. Eerily so; it could be another wing of the Blue Palace, apart from the black and gold banners on the walls. There’s a kitchen in the basement, books on the shelves, neglected flowers in fine glazed pots. A ledger detailing shipments of alto wine and fresh fruit from the East Empire Company. Otherwise there are no files or documents, not even a safe where documents might be hidden. Freyja supposes she should have expected it – whatever else they may be, the Thalmor are no fools. They probably keep their intelligence locked up in the Embassy. She rifles the books, searches for hidden compartments in the desks, but the only thing that might be of interest is the large map laid out on a spare table.

Freyja leans over it, bracing her palms against the wood. Clearly the elves are keeping an eye on the war; little red and blue flags are scattered over the parchment, thrust deeply into the boards beneath. Hold capitals are noted, along with some of the larger towns and many of Skyrim’s scattered forts. A black flag marks the Embassy, and another marks a fortress to the west.

She cranes her neck, curious. It’s on the far northern coast, nearly on the border with High Rock, tucked between the mountains and the sea. A strange place for a garrison. Defensible, to be sure, but as far as Freyja knows there is nothing of strategic value nearby; Skyrim’s northwest coast is barren and remote, hardly even populated. Freyja leans further over the map. A fine, flowing hand names the fortress Northwatch Keep.

She turns back to the ledger, energized now, flipping pages until she finds an entry marked NW. An outgoing shipment – food, mostly, enough for a small detachment. There are more entries like it, dated roughly a week apart. They’re unimpressive: cured meats, sacks of flour, root vegetables, occasional weapons and smithing supplies.

Unimpressive, that is, except for the potion ingredients. Freyja is no alchemist, but she knows what nightshade and deathbell are used for.  _Gotcha,_  she thinks, and pulls out her own map. Feeling rather flushed with victory, and mindful of her promise to bring back dinner, she raids their kitchen cupboards on her way out.

She slips outside and makes her way back to Solitude’s residential section without a hitch. She has just begun to relax her guard when a body collides with her own, so hard that Freyja puts a hand on her sword. “Oh,” says a voice, as she whips around. “It’s you.”

That greeting does nothing to calm her nerves, but the flyaway blond hair and round face of the little girl does. It’s only Addvar’s daughter, dashing home for bedtime; the fishmonger lives just across from Styrr. “Hi, Svari,” Freyja says. “You’re out late.”

“I guess,” says the little girl, listlessly. “Ma doesn’t really notice if I’m a little late anymore.”

Freyja frowns. While she’s fairly certain she’d make an atrocious mother, she's always had a soft spot for children - and especially for this one, with her bright smile and sad eyes. She's not sure she'll ever forget the ugly scene she walked in on the first time she arrived in Solitude, shopkeepers and fruit vendors clamoring for the death of their neighbor. She is accustomed to dealing with bandits and cutthroats, and far from squeamish about a few rolling heads. But the fury directed towards a man many of the townsfolk had known their whole lives startled her. The fishmonger ordering his daughter home while the little girl protested her uncle Roggvir's innocence was the icing on that particularly unpleasant sweetroll.

"Is your ma still going to temple?" she asks.

"Yeah," says Svari. "She's still sad a lot, though."

"You may just have to give her time."

"That's what Papa says."

"You look a bit sad yourself,” Freyja says, carefully.

"I wanted to play dragonslayers, but Kayd says there aren't any more dragons." Svari kicks at a stone, viciously enough to send it skittering away along the cobbles. "OR any dragonslayers. Except I heard a dragon attacked Helgen and saved Ulfric Stormcloak right before the soldiers were going to chop off his head."

It's not terribly hard to see why the child likes the story. Freyja’s heart twists.

"And  _Minette_  said that dragons are only stories for babies, and then Kayd told her to shut up because his  _ma_  said he had to be extra nice to me, and everyone feels sorry for me and whispers about me and  _I hate it_!"

"Svari--"

"Go away!" The little girl ducks her head, scuffing at the street as though searching for another hapless stone, but not before Freyja sees that her eyes are brimming with furious unshed tears. "I don't want to talk anymore."

"All right," Freyja says. "If you don't want to hear about the dragon."

Svari stares up at her. "Dragon?"

Freyja hesitates. She avoids talking about her encounters with dragons, especially in Solitude; technically she's still a fugitive from Imperial justice, after all. But she bulls forward before she can let herself change her mind. Apparently, tonight is a night for daring. "I was in Helgen when the dragon attacked," she admits.

"Really?" The little girl stumbles over her questions, eyes huge. "Was it big? Did it breathe fire?"

Freyja chuckles in spite of herself. "Yes, yes, and yes. Oh my goodness, yes."

"Oh wow, I knew it! I knew they were real!” The girl bounds up the stairs to her front door. “I have to remember to tell Papa!"

_Just don’t tell General Tullius,_  Freyja thinks ruefully, as the girl dashes inside. Then again, maybe the man wouldn’t care. At the time he seemed too busy with Ulfric Stormcloak to take notice of anyone else; it was one of his captains that actually sentenced her to death, and Freyja returned the favor almost as soon as she was free – with a smaller axe, but much more success. Likely the general has too much on his plate to worry about a single escaped prisoner.

She wonders when she grew so close-lipped about her own past. There was a time, when she was nineteen and eager to prove herself, when Freyja would have boasted for anyone to hear that she’d escaped one dragon and helped to slay another, regardless of the consequences. It’s not that she’s afraid to die. If that were the case, she would be staying far, far away from any actions likely to anger the Thalmor. Death is the currency of her profession, and Freyja is at ease with the notion that she will die with a sword in her hand, likely before reaching old age. But there is a terrible responsibility in being the sort of character that children play at being: a dragonslayer, a hero marked by the hand of fate. Even the idea makes her feel like a child herself. A girl, dressed in her father’s borrowed armor. An imposter bearing a wooden sword.

Freyja shakes herself, pushing open the door to the priest’s dwelling. When she enters Styrr is handing Eitri a tall reddish bottle. “I can’t make any promises,” says the old man. “These things have to be attended to quickly, or even the best healers can only do so much. You’ll have quite a scar. Drink this potion, exercise it every day, and it may not always be crippled, though. You’ll have to wait and see.”

It’s nothing she didn’t expect to hear, but Freyja still winces in sympathy at the word  _crippled_. She can’t imagine taking such a wound to her sword arm. Eitri seems to be in good spirits, though, and he has apparently won Styrr over; the man offers them his guest room for the night. “How’s the hand?” Freyja asks Eitri, as they climb the stairs.

“Better,” he says, flexing it with a wince. His fingers don’t hang so limp and clawlike now, though the movement is terribly stiff. “The old man did a good job. He owes you some kind of favor?”

“I…took care of a necromancer problem.”

“That’s what – when you said we needed to see a mage, I thought you meant…you know. Wizards. Not a priest.”

She forgets how suspicious she used to be of magic. “They use exactly the same healing spells, you know.”

“I suppose,” Eitri says, with a little wrinkle of doubt between his brows.

There’s a pail of water and a basin in the guest room, and they both make grateful use of it to wash up before Freyja starts pulling bread and fruit and fine aged cheese out of her pack. After the long day’s journey they are both famished, and for a time they eat in silence, kneeling on the rug beside a little table. “This is good cheese,” Eitri finally says.

Freyja toasts him with it. “Courtesy of the Aldmeri Dominion.”

He stares at her. “What?”

“I broke into their headquarters,” Freyja says. “They had a very well-stocked kitchen.”

“Are you insane?” he barks, with a heat that surprises her. “You could have been killed!”

“I could have been killed rescuing you from those justiciars, but I didn’t hear you complaining then,” Freyja says, annoyed. She hopes he’s not going to be the sort of man who treats her like glass simply because he took her to bed. “How else would you suggest we start looking for your cousin?”

“You could have said something—”

“What, in front of Styrr?” She scoffs. “I can take care of myself.”

Eitri probes absently at his bandaged hand. “Obviously,” he says, after a moment. “Sorry. I just – I know what they’re like. The Thalmor.”

That’s fair enough, Freyja supposes. She chews on her apple.

“Did you find anything?” Eitri asks.

“Not much. The headquarters is nothing but the end of their supply line – and a way to keep some of the Legion’s spies busy, I assume. All they’ve got in there are shipping records.” His face falls. “Don’t give up yet – you can learn a lot about someone by where they get their bread and mead. You need to bag an elk, you stake out its food and water. People aren’t much different.” She unrolls her map, weights down one edge with a tankard. “All their supplies come through Solitude, but they’re only distributing them to a couple of places. One is the Embassy, and we're not getting in there - that place is locked up tighter than Cidhna Mine. The good news is it's unlikely they keep anyone but high-priority prisoners there. Not even the Thalmor can maintain that kind of security if they have to open it up for every poor bastard they accuse of worshipping Talos. Ever hear of Northwatch Keep?"

"No."

Freyja taps a finger on the north coast. "Neither have I, but I'd be ready to bet half my purse that it's where they keep the rest of their captives. It's remote, it's defensible - just the fact that we haven't heard of it says they try to keep it discreet. According to the records they send a cartful of food out there every week or two, along with a fair amount of nightshade and deathbell."

"Poison?"

"Mm. And given how remote the place is, I’d say it’s getting used for interrogation, not assassination."

Eitri flinches a little.  _Insensitive,_  Freyja thinks, chewing her lip, but it can't be helped now. "Even if I'm wrong, the Thalmor have the most efficient intelligence network in Tamriel - during the Great War they made the Blades look like children playing cloak and dagger. A network that big doesn't function without written records. Well-guarded ones, but still. If there's one thing we don't have, it's information. They'll have it."

“So the plan is to just – what, storm the keep? With two of us?”

“Even I’m not that crazy. A few justiciars I can handle, but a garrison of them would take me to pieces. Hopefully there’s another way in; a lot of these old castles have wells, hidden tunnels, that kind of thing. Either way, we won’t know until we scout the place out. We’ll just have to play it by ear.” Freyja rolls up the map, stuffs it back into her pack. “Get some rest. I’d say we’ve got eight, ten days journey, and that’s if we don’t run into trouble on the way. Men tell strange stories about the Sea of Ghosts.”

She lays down her sword and shield within easy reach of the bed, starts shedding her armor while Eitri peels off his shirt. From the corner of her eye Freyja catches sight of the solid wedge of his back, the pull and flex of his shoulderblades like two broad axe heads as he shucks the garment over his head. When he turns back to her she quickly averts her gaze. He shakes his head. “I still can’t believe you broke into their headquarters. You’re a brave woman. Gods only know what they’d have done if they’d caught you.”

“There was no one inside.”

"Still. You shouldn't have done it."

"I specialize in doing things I shouldn't."

He smiles a little, takes a step forward. Brushes a strand of hair off her cheek. Freyja jerks back. "No."

He looks startled by her abruptness. Truth be told, he probably has a right to; half a moment ago she was aimlessly admiring the play of muscles beneath his skin as he undressed. Most men would take that as an encouraging signal. And she can't deny that she does want him, in the most primal of ways - that her body liked the way they fit together. He cocks his head at her. Freyja grits her teeth. She has her reasons - complicated ones, and she’s not about to explain them to him.

"A man told me once that there's nothing like a woman after a good fight," she murmurs, searching for a simpler explanation. "My tastes run to men, but I'm as much a warrior as he was." Even as she says it, she winces. She’d never call what they did  _making love,_  but it doesn’t feel right to dismiss it as an inconsequential tumble, either.

"Of course you are." Eitri‘s tone is so fierce that she raises an eyebrow at him. He shifts, ducks his head. His voice is gruff. "You saved my life, I'm not like to forget that," he says.

“You’re welcome.”

There’s a long silence. “If I offended you--”

"You haven't offended me," Freyja says sharply. "I don't sleep with travelling companions, is all."

That furrows his brow. "Let me get this straight," he says. "When I was just some stranger whose life you’d saved you were happy to have me in your bed, but now that we’ll be sharing the road you want none of it.”

"That's about the shape of it.”

He looks at her curiously, scrubbing his beard, and then shrugs. “I – fair enough.”

He handles rejection well, she’ll give him that. Freyja crawls into bed. “Good night.”

Eitri hesitates. “Do you - that bedroll--”

“Oh, don’t be an idiot,” she snaps. “I’m not going to make you sleep on the floor like some blushing maiden. We’ll be sharing a tent for the next two weeks - it’s not much bigger than this bed, I promise you.”

He pulls his shirt back on before climbing in beside her, which Freyja finds quaintly endearing in spite of herself. Soon, though, she’s wishing she’d taken him up on his offer. It’s not the first time she’s shared a bed with a fellow traveler - crowded inns, lack of funds, sheer safety in a hostile place. A number of those beds were significantly smaller than this one. Still, she spends the next twenty minutes excruciatingly aware of the rise and fall of his broad chest beside her.  _Only natural,_  she tells herself.  _You did sleep with him, you’re not just going to forget. And it has been a long time._

She wonders if he’s facing the same struggle.


	4. A Sea of Ghosts

They slip into the tunnel before sunup, but they aren’t finished with Solitude yet. Freyja leaves Eitri sitting on the stairs, flexing his hand in the loose open-and-close way that Styr recommended, and goes back to the city for food and supplies. Most shops won’t open for hours yet, so she climbs the stairs to the windmill bridge and watches the sun rise over the sea. When she leans out over the ramparts there’s a coating of frost pressed against her elbows. Her skin glows in the cold. Freyja closes her eyes, and the rising sun paints the insides of her eyelids the color of Eitri’s hair.  
  
She returns to the tunnel with food that will keep, another cloak and bedroll, a simple war axe, and a set of leather armor that she hopes will fit. When she tosses it to Eitri he stares. The leather thumps into the ancient powdery stonedust on the floor. He makes no move to pick it up. Freyja holds out the axe, and he stares some more. She shoves it at him, impatient. “I assume you’ve chopped plenty of logs to feed your forge,” she says. “Men aren’t terribly different.”  
  
“It’s not – I don’t have any  _coin_!”  
  
“Yes, I know. And I do. And you need armor.”  
  
“You can’t just—”  
  
“Look,” Freyja says. “I’m not rich, but it’s not hard to make gold as a sellsword, either. I’d rather spend some of it now than get killed because I’m watching you instead of my own flank. Consider it an investment in keeping us both alive.” She shrugs. “Besides, I traded for the armor – that elven stuff we had was yours by right, you killed him. Pay me back for the axe and the cloak in Ivarstead, if you like.”  
  
“What if we never make it back to Ivarstead?”  
  
“Then I’ll have no need of your money, will I? Now swallow that stubborn peasant’s pride and  _put on your damned armor._ ”  
  
He does, shaking his head all the way. “You’re either the most generous person I’ve ever met, or--”  
  
“Hardly. I don’t do a job by halves, is all.”  
  
“I’ve not even hired you,” he grumbles, but he takes the axe when she offers it.  
  
Later that day they pass the lighthouse that marks the spot where the muscular brackish river joins the Sea of Ghosts. After that they leave the road and follow the shoreline, walking along the tide by day, pulling back to make camp under the trees by night. One can learn a lot about a man, when sharing a tent that’s rather snug even for one. Freyja learns that the burn scar on Eitri’s forearm is not from his forge, as one might expect of a blacksmith, but from a spilled pot of stew when he was a child. She learns that he would rather eat a fresh loaf of crusty bread than a sweet roll. She learns that he is just shy of his 34th birthday, and that he once walked the 7000 steps to High Hrothgar ( _Well, it’s right there,_  he says, and then,  _I was helping a friend cart up some supplies,_  and then, with a hint of awe,  _I’ve never seen anything like it_ ). She learns that he is astonishingly easy to talk to.  
  
(She learns that he is the sort of man who radiates heat while he sleeps, and that in her own slumber her body seems determined to snuggle closer to that warmth, only to leave her twitching back in dismay when morning dawns.)

Eitri has never seen the sea. Freyja has, but only in the baked-stone ports of Hammerfell, or at the bustling docks of Solitude with a thousand tarred lines creaking and the wind sighing underneath the arch - never this lonely, broken coastline, inhabited by only beasts and birds. It's beautiful in a bleak sort of way, the grey water and dark pines and coarse dark sand. Once they spot a sabrecat, crouched and tonguing rainwater out of a divot in the wet black rock. Every guard hair of its pelt seems to bristle like a separate living thing, silvered at the tips as though with frost. They give the cat a wide berth, along with the occasional ship slotted into a narrow cove ("Smugglers," Freyja says, eyeing the sleek small crafts); sometimes they happen upon the flotsam of a shipwreck, or a tiny fishing camp with salmon smoking over a driftwood fire, but otherwise they are alone.

On the open beach Freyja drills Eitri in combat, the wet sand crunching beneath their boots and the ring of steel echoing back along with the surf and the gulls. Their blades have naked edges. It's a risk, but nothing else handles like steel, and Eitri does not pose a challenge to Freyja who has lived by her sword-arm for years. Nor does he possess the raw unpredictability of a true beginner - he is no warrior, but a weapon sits comfortably in his hand. Freyja would rather run risks now than walk into a fight with the Thalmor alongside a man whose martial strengths and weaknesses she does not know.

"Right," she says, giving ground, catching his blow expertly on her shield. A few lonely flurries are drifting around them today, melting as soon as they strike the ground; such snows are becoming more frequent, as autumn fades. "High. Left. Right. Right. Block."

Their blades lock, trapped between their straining bodies. Freyja has to throw her weight forward to absorb the shock; what Eitri lacks in skill he makes up in the strength of a man accustomed to hammering metal. Despite the cold he is sweating, hair mussed and sticking to his forehead. They're so close she can feel the heat rising off his skin. He tries to press the advantage of his strength and weight, and when she staggers he grins at her, face flushed and eyes alight. Her stomach flutters.

"Block," Freyja snaps. She disengages, swings into a backhand cut that catches him solidly beneath the ribs with the flat of her sword. He goes sprawling.

Freyja steps back, wiping her face. Her own cheeks feel bright with cold. "I told you not to overcommit," she says.

“Aye,” he pants, clutching his side. “That you did.”

“Lose your balance like that in a real fight and you’re dead.” She plants her sword point-down in the sand, pulls him to his feet. He’s still for a moment. The white gusts of his breath drift in the air between them. It takes her too long to realize that she has not let go of his hand.

It’s warm; his palm, so much larger than her own, is pleasantly calloused, and his thumb rests upon the sensitive skin at the back of her wrist. Freyja drops it like a snake. Cheeks heating, she glances up to see him looking at her curiously, before something over her shoulder draws his gaze. His eyes go wide.

A thunderous shriek reverberates down the mountains, so deep it seems to echo in her bones.

Freyja wheels. The clouds are low and thick, mushy as old sea ice, but inside the grey shroud that noise booms against the hidden peaks once more. Her heart starts kicking against her ribs like a furious horse. "Run," Freyja says, but she's the one who's frozen; Eitri's hand clamps around her wrist and yanks her toward the trees before she comes to her senses, snatching up her sword and sprinting for cover. A thin branch whips across her cheek as they plunge into the undergrowth. Then they are both flat on their bellies, breathing the rich damp odor of spruce needles and lichen and earth.

"Did you see it?" Eitri whispers, after a moment.

Freyja shakes her head. She recalls the wide flare of his green irises as he glanced over her shoulder. "You did."

"I saw something," he says, "but the clouds--"

Another roar.

“Gods," Eitri breathes. "What is that?"

He says it like a man who already suspects the answer, but wants to hear another voice it first. Freyja peers up through the spruce branches. She can still envision the Imperial soldiers glancing into the bright blue sky, shrugging their shoulders and carrying on with the execution while the birds fell ominously silent. She shakes her head again. For a moment neither of them speaks. Another roar sounds, more distantly this time. “Dragon,” she finally says.

Eitri’s voice is hushed. “Have you ever seen one?”

“I don’t know what else it could be,” Freyja says, dodging the question. “Have you ever heard anything else make a sound like that?”

“Do you think it’ll come back?”

“I think I’d rather not chance building a fire tonight.”

They make camp in a deep thicket, cocooned out of sight from both the sea and the sky. The sun sets early - earlier still in the piney gloom of the forest - and without a fire there is no reason to lie awake. They sup on dried fruit and cold meat and retire to the tent, spreading their bedrolls down on a carpet of moss.

In the narrow space Eitri’s shoulder brushes against her as he wriggles beneath his furs.  _Get a grip on yourself, woman,_  Freyja scolds, thinking back to the warmth of his hand around her own. It simply isn’t practical to get so involved with comrades in arms. Tamriel is a dangerous place. Freyja has heard it said that Skyrim is its most dangerous province – and that was before the civil war and the dragons. Take a lover on the road, and sooner or later the odds are good that you will watch your lover die.

She has no desire to repeat that experience. It’s been six years since Freyja fell in kicking, clawing, reluctant, consuming love with Indros her fellow sellsword, and just over a year since his death; she no longer feels his absence like a yawning bloody hole, a ribcage crushed by a battleaxe. But it still aches. If she is honest with herself, part of the reason she rushed so eagerly over the Jeralls when war broke out was to escape the emptiness of Cyrodiil, without him in it.

They were an unlikely pair: their skillsets disparate, their people ancient enemies, their temperaments flame and frost. Born with fire magic in his blood, Indros was calculating, cool of humor; Freyja could stand beside an open window in the mountain air of Bruma in naught but a shift while Indros grumbled at her to come back to bed, but she had the fiery, reckless sort of temper that led to tavern brawls, to victorious grins through black eyes and split lips. Even their lifespans were at odds; at 97 he was both young for an elf, and older than she was ever like to get. But Freyja loved him all the more for their differences. She might have married him, if either of them had ever thought to suggest visiting a temple. Caught up in adventure and youth and the gold to be made doing dangerous work, neither of them ever did, but they talked about their future as married people do. They even talked of that long elven lifespan, of how she would grow old while Indros was scarcely middle-aged, of the certainty that she would die before him. They came to terms with it. Somehow they never considered the reverse.

It happened, though. There’s no changing it. And then Cyrodiil buzzed with the news: death, insurrection, the Nords gone to war. For the first time in many years Freyja thought of  _Skyrim_  and  _home_  in the same breath. For the first time in months she felt a thrill of excitement about raising her sword. But the only thing this war seems to lack is a just cause, and Skyrim is not the homeland she left ten years before. It’s still savage and beautiful, so beautiful she’s surprised she ever left, but Freyja feels like a stranger. In Whiterun – in the scant few hours she spent there, running back and forth to the keep – she strode by people she had known since childhood without a hint of recognition. That’s not so surprising; she wears her hair differently now, and a thin scar crosses her face from cheek to jawline. Another one ticks faintly across the corner of her mouth, and time in the Alik’r Desert and the Nibenay Valley has left her so freckled that her coloring might pass for Imperial at a distance, if her height and build were not so unmistakably Nordic. She suspects she walks differently too, with the easy competence of a tried warrior rather than the eagerness of youth. People move out of her way.

What surprised Freyja was how little she recognized Whiterun. Her parents had their one child late in life and died while she was abroad, so she didn’t expect to find family. But the bustling market town she knew from childhood had changed. Men eyed each other suspiciously in the streets; guards kept their hands on their swords. Travelling merchants from other holds were nowhere to be found, and the local ones apologized for the price of their wares, citing bandits and the war. It always came back to the war. Apparently the Grey-Manes and the Battle-Borns had some sort of political feud going on. The families had been fast friends when Freyja lived in Whiterun; she’d played tag and hide-and-hunt and slay-the-monster with some of their children, growing up.

And then there were the dragons. She shakes her head, remembering Irileth after the fight at the Western Watchtower.  _I don’t need some mythical Dragonborn,_  the housecarl had said, and by the gods had she sounded like Indros - that sharp Dunmeri accent smoothed at the corners by travel, the skeptical tilt of her eyebrow.  _Someone who can put down a dragon is more than enough for me._  Freyja hadn’t put down a dragon, though. She’d crouched behind stairs and pillars with all the rest of them and helped fill the beast with arrows, and once it was downed she’d rushed in to strike the killing blow. If she had been less quick or less lucky she might have been roasted or eaten just as easily as some of her less fortunate comrades. On her own, she would not have stood a chance. That’s why she and Eitri are currently bedded down in the darkest thicket they can find. That's why they don't dare start a fire. If she were capable of going one-on-one with a dragon, she’d be the richest sellsword in Tamriel and Helgen might not be in smoking ruins and Indros would not be dead.

“Do you know the words?”

It’s only then that she realizes she is humming under her breath: a bawdy Colovian lay about a goat and a cask of brandy. Freyja looks up to see Eitri laying back on the bedroll with one forearm pillowed beneath his head, listening to her song with sleepy eyes. She wonders how long she has been lost in her thoughts. How long he has been watching her. “You hum a lot,” he says, flushing a little.

“I know a lot of drinking songs.”

He smiles. “Brokkr would like you.”

“Comes of rooming in taverns for ten years,” Freyja says, but her thoughts are on his cousin. It’s odd to be part of a rescue mission for a man she’s never met. She’s done it before, of course, but it was always a job:  _find my father, help my daughter, save my friend, you’ll be rewarded handsomely._  It wasn’t that she didn’t feel compassion for them, but her clients were just that – clients. Freeing their loved ones from highwaymen or necromancers or men with old grudges was rewarding, but it was also something she was hired to do. This is different. Whatever she said to Eitri about the value of elven armor, she is helping him because she wants to. Because it’s clear that he truly does care for his cousin. Because it strikes her as unbearably cruel that a brave man should walk to certain death because he loves his kin too well to give up, even when the odds are hopeless. “What’s he like?” she asks.

Eitri shakes his head, fondly. “Well, I told you – he’s been known to shoot off his mouth. Hot-tempered, like they say redheads are. Impatient. I think he’d lose his mind, bent over a grindstone all day putting new edges on dull axes.”

“You need patience to stalk a deer,” Freyja points out.

“That’s different. You’ve got to keep alert – it’s exciting, even when you’re standing still. Brokkr hates to be bored. Always has. I remember when we were children, there was one winter we had so much snow you could scarce step out of the house - you can’t imagine the mischief, after being cooped up inside for a few weeks. Talked me into helping him ice the tavern steps while everyone was inside drinking one evening. It’s a wonder no one broke a neck.”

Freyja laughs. "Your cousin sounds like me. Divines, what a terror I was."

"No - I bet you were a sweet kid."

Freyja snorts. "I bloodied the neighbor boy's nose because he told me girls weren't supposed to play with wooden swords. Once - you've heard of the Gildegreen?"

"The sacred tree, aye."

"Well, I climbed it," Freyja says. "Right to the top. The branches up there could barely take my weight, they dipped six feet every time the wind blew. The priestess of Kynareth was furious. So were my parents - though I overheard my father say it was a strangely fitting form of worship, for the sky goddess."

Eitri swallows a chuckle. “Did you drag anyone else up the tree with you?”

“Not that time, no. I was good friends with one of the Grey-Mane kids, though, and we got into plenty of trouble.”

He stares at her. “As in, Eorlund Grey-Mane?”

“His daughter.”

“You grew up playing with lords’ children.” Eitri looks rather awed. “You know  _Eorlund Grey-Mane_.”

Freyja knows the man is a fine smith, but she thinks of him as Olfina’s rather gruff and inscrutable father. She supposes it makes sense, though, that a fellow blacksmith would revere him so. “They’re not all that different,” she says. “The Grey-Manes were as poor as the rest of us, even if they had a famous name. The Battle-Borns weren’t, I suppose, but children are children. We all played tag together just the same.” She shifts her shoulder out of a divot on the ground. “What about you – what was it like being born and raised in Ivarstead?”

“Not born.”

“I thought you said you’d lived there all your life?”

“Well – not all my life. Almost as long as I can remember, though. My parents and I lived in Northwind. Little mining camp, on the border of Eastmarch. It’s not there any more. When I was three there was a cave-in. Killed my father and mother both.”

“Do you remember them?”

Eitri goes quiet, considering. “I remember my mother’s laugh,” he says. “And I remember my father smelled of stonedust. Not much. I was too young, I think. My aunt and uncle are the ones who raised me. I was lucky – they didn’t have much, but they wouldn’t hear of sending me to Honorhall. Aunt Hrefna borrowed a neighbor’s horse and rode out to get me herself. She and my father were always close, I guess.”

“Sounds like a good woman.”

“She was,” he says. “My uncle too. He was the village blacksmith – most men would have wanted to hand down the craft to their trueborn son, but Brokkr never had an interest in it and my uncle never insisted. I wasn’t his blood, but he never treated me that way. And Brokkr – he was no older than I was when my parents died, a few months younger, actually, and suddenly he had to share everything. Toys, sweets, his ma and pa. We even slept in the same bed for a while. I don’t think it was easy on him, at first, but he never treated me like an intruder. We were best friends growing up.” He smiles wryly. “Course, he may just have been happy to have someone to get into trouble with him.”

Freyja smiles with him. She can see why he cares for his family so. When he yawns, she settles back into her bedroll and closes her eyes, smelling moss and the strange heavy smell of the hide tent. “Good night,” she says.

 

* * *

  
The coast unspools slowly beneath their feet. To their left the mountains rise in ever more jagged ridges, but they don’t see or hear sign of any more dragons. To their right the Sea of Ghosts laps steadily at the shore. Occasionally a small lone iceberg drifts by. Some days it is bitterly cold, with winds that whip Freyja’s hair into a salt-filled tumble and stab like a blade, sliding between armor plates to find the heart. Other days a wooly fog coats their fur cloaks like dew. Once the day dawns clear and they walk most of the morning in silence, staring up at the peaks etched impossibly stark against the sky, or out at the endless silver sea.

Most days, though, they chat as they walk. Eitri is a good companion: eager to listen and quick to laugh, with an easy, self-deprecating humor. Freyja wonders if she can call him a friend. At the very least she’s glad to know she bedded a man she still likes, once she’s gotten to know him.

The further they travel, the more their conversation turns to the possibility of finding his cousin. "If we find him - what then?" Eitri says, brushing a snowflake out of his eyelashes. It’s the first substantial snow they’ve had: small, slow flakes that gather thinly on the ground, so thinly that the outline of every stone is visible underneath.

"Assuming we can break him out without getting ourselves killed? We run," Freyja says. "As far and as fast as we can. The way I see it, we have two options. We can go over the mountains, into the Reach - I've gotten to know the land some, and it's rough country. Easy to hide in, but crawling with hags and Forsworn and every other foul thing that would just as soon kill you as look at you, and the Dominion has quite a presence in Markarth. Or we can follow the coast back east, maybe get passage on a ship. We'll make better time, but so will anyone coming after us, and I don't know the terrain between Solitude and Dawnstar. We'll hit the Stormcloak side of the map sooner, though. Not that the Thalmor can't follow us into Stormcloak territory, but at least they're forced to operate less openly."

For a moment he is quiet. “They’re not going to stop hunting me, are they?” he asks.

“No,” Freyja says. “They’re not. Not if we manage to find your cousin and free him, at any rate. They don’t take that kind of thing lightly.”

Eitri rubs at the scar tissue on his palm. The movement in his fingers is coming back, but his grip strength is still meager; Freyja loaned him her shield for their last practice session, and he dropped it every time her sword connected.

“I’d go to Hammerfell, if I were you,” she offers. “It’s not bound by the White-Gold Concordat. No justiciars, and plenty of old soldiers who hate the Dominion.”

“You’ve been there, right?” he says.

“You could say I cut my warrior’s teeth in Hammerfell. The Great War went on for another five years there – the country was in pieces by the time it was done. It was a dangerous place for a long while, but that meant a lot of work for a sellsword.”

His voice is distant. “What’s it like?”

“Hot,” Freyja says, after consideration. “During the day, at least. There are canyons where the rock breaks off in squares, like castles walls turned all to red stone. Sandstorms. Sometimes the sun is so bright on the desert it looks like snow.” She smiles faintly. “And then, along the coast, everything is green. The merchant ports are always crowded. You’d swear no one ever sleeps. There’s a street in Sentinel that’s nothing but a market – spices and fruit and bolts of cloth in every color you can imagine.”

He seems to mull over that for a long time. When he speaks his voice is hesitant. “It sounds beautiful,” he says. “Did you ever…”

“Ever what?”

“Get homesick,” he murmurs.

_I was never homesick for Skyrim until I came home to it,_  Freyja thinks, but even in her head it sounds like nonsense. “Not really,” she says. “I think you have to be lonely to be homesick.”

His face is serious. “You ought to go yourself. They’ll be looking for you, too.”

It’s a surprisingly tempting notion. Freyja did love Hammerfell, while she was there: the desert so hauntingly barren, the port cities so vibrantly alive. For a moment she contemplates running far away from Skyrim and its problems. Looking up comrades from years ago, testing her sword arm in lost desert canyons, maybe even settling down.  _Maybe even settling down with a fellow refugee,_  says a whisper in her head,  _one bound by common experience, with broad shoulders and bright hair and gentle hands._  And yet something in her shuns the notion. This land has a stronger hold on her than she ever guessed. And buried at the back of her mind she can hear that rolling echo of  _DOVAHKIIN,_  and the softer one of Eitri asking her  _who else?_

She swallows. One impossible task at a time. Eitri doesn’t seem to notice that she hasn’t answered; he’s watching the snow, his full lips quirked in a sad little line.  _He’s homesick already,_  Freyja thinks. She doesn’t blame him. The man’s lived in one village since he was three. For most of her adult life Freyja has made a habit out of cheerful rootlessness, but now she even envies him a little. “Tell me about Ivarstead,” she says.

“What is there to tell?”

_It's the warmness in your voice I want to hear,_  she thinks. "Just tell me about it."

He flexes his hand, bites his lip. "It's...quiet. Well - no, actually, it isn't. The Darkwater River has its source in Lake Geir, and the town's built inside the first bend, by a little set of falls. It's never quiet." He shakes his head. "The first time I left town overnight – a trip to Riften, for supplies – I couldn't sleep, for the quiet."

"And you swam in the river, growing up," says Freyja - knowing it's true, somehow. "You and your cousin."

"Aye," he says. "The current is strong under the bridge, but Brokkr was always jumping off it. No matter how many times my uncle thrashed him."

"And you jumped, too?"

"Sometimes," he says. "Brokkr was good at talking me into stupid things."

"Water was cold, I bet."

He laughs - a curious, brittle sound. "By the Nine, yes. It comes down off the Throat of the World - in the height of summer it's like a knife. On hot days at the forge sometimes I dunk my head in the river after lunch, and let me tell you, if you stay under more than a moment you’re like to think someone put a dagger through your temple. It’s that cold.”

That paints a vivid picture: Eitri bent over the glowing forge, hair shaggy with damp, river water trickling in streams over his bare torso. “You said your uncle taught you to smith?” Freyja asks, quickly.

“He did. Good teacher.” Eitri smiles faintly. “Brokkr used to tell anyone who would listen that I was going to be the best smith in Skyrim, when we were small. He was always pretending to slay monsters, but it was always my blade he was using to do it.”

“It’s been a long time since I’ve seen the Rift.”

“Autumn’s the best time – the leaves are even brighter. When the wind combs over the treetops they chime and whisper like little sheaves of gold.”

“It sounds beautiful,” Freyja echoes, quietly.

“It is.” He shakes his head. “It’s strange to think I never saw them turn this year. They’ll have gone to rust by now.”

A sudden sound makes them both glance up, but it’s no dragon’s roar. A herd of ponderous, tusked creatures is gathered by the shoreline, inching along on tiny flippers and snorting thickly. Freyja grins. They’re even more absurd in life than they are in books.　

“What in…” Eitri says, a slow smile tugging at his mouth. “Those are the strangest animals I’ve ever seen. Now I know what they mean when they say  _clumsy as a drunken horker._ ”

Freyja watches the ungainly beasts lolloping along the shore. “I read somewhere that they can be aggressive.”

“Imagine telling that story in the tavern.  _One moment I was strolling beside the Sea of Ghosts, the next I was running from a horde of angry horkers..._ ”

“I think a fast walk would suffice.”

Eitri laughs aloud. It rings in the cold air. One of the horkers trumpets an abrupt, startled bellow at the sound, and the sight of the creature attempting to scurry closer to its fellows illustrates the point so neatly that Freyja starts to laugh as well. “ _Horker Attacks,_ ” she snorts. “Some scholar was desperate to sell a book, or else some old Nord had an interesting sense of humor.”

There is snow settling on the shoulders of Eitri’s cloak, a few flakes sharp white in the red of his beard. His teeth gleam white as well. Suddenly Freyja is sick unto death of caution and planning and good sense. She bends at the waist, scoops up a bit of snow. It lays so thinly on the beach that she has to scrape a patch of ground bare before she can get a proper handful, and there are bits of dark sand packed into her snowball. By the time Eitri has cocked his head curiously at her she is already tossing it into the midst of the horkers.

The snowball hits a rock by the shore and flies apart. Horkers rear and scatter. A few head for the sea, a few scoot further away along the shore, but one fastens beady black eyes in their direction. With an enraged bellow and a determined thump of its tail it begins to waddle towards them. Taking note of its plodding charge, the others turn and follow.

“Oh, gods,” Eitri says, starting to chuckle all over again.

“A horde of angry horkers.”

“We probably should run.”

They do, sprinting further up the beach and dashing nimbly past the horkers, which pile up in a confused mass and then hop slowly around on their flippers to follow them. Freyja and Eitri leave the creatures far behind, running and slipping along the stony shore until they are winded by their own laughter.

“There’s your tavern story,” Freyja gasps, red-cheeked with cold. “You can tell your cousin. Some bard will make a song of it.”

Eitri is bent double, holding his ribs. “That wasn’t very nice,” he chokes, once he can speak.

“I kill bandits for money. Who said I was nice?”

When he leans an elbow on her shoulder – an innocent, comradely gesture, steadying himself as he laughs – Freyja does not shrug it away. She claps a hand on his shoulder instead, brushing the hair out of her eyes. Grinning, she looks around and gets her bearings. The mountains have almost crowded out the shoreline here, leaving a thin ribbon of stone and sand to snake around the foot of rapidly steepening cliffs. Freyja wonders if the strip of dry ground disappears when the tide is high. Further west the ridgeline bends inland, leaving a more respectable amount of land on which to camp. Suddenly she stiffens. Fades back toward the cliffs. Eitri looks up.

“I think we found Northwatch Keep,” Freyja says.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The last two chapters have been a bit exposition-heavy (the setup is important, I promise). Next one is where life gets exciting for our heroes...


	5. Rescues

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It might be worthwhile to reiterate that this story is rated M, for sex, violence, and the Thalmor being their usual charming selves.

Even behind fat white snowflakes, the grim upthrust of an old stone tower is unmistakable. It’s maybe two miles distant, but there is precious little cover on the bare shelf of land that makes up those miles. Freyja flattens her body against the cliff face and considers boulders, driftwood, lone spindly pines. Getting close without being spotted is going to be a chore. For a moment she and Eitri stand with their arms still around each other’s shoulders, eyeing the keep through the falling snow.

Eitri shifts beside her. “You’re sure that’s it?”

“I don’t imagine there are many old fortresses way out here.”

“So how do we get inside?”

“Easy now,” Freyja warns. “We’ve got to scout the place, first. And before we can do that, we have to get near it without raising an alarm – which looks like it’s going to be as much fun as a barrel of frozen mead. A skeever would have trouble staying under cover out there.”

“We’ve got to try.”

From someone else Freyja might take offense at the suggestion that she would quit, but the stubborn set of his jaw is rather endearing. She flashes him a grin. “Don’t worry. I’ve already told you that I specialize in doing things I shouldn’t.”

Three hours later, she’s feeling less brash. The two of them are crouched near the shore, behind a boulder crusted in salty rime; Freyja intends to make camp on the mountainside, but they’ve gotten as close as she dares in daylight. Her every muscle aches with the effort of creeping by inches across the barren snowfield. Black water laps occasionally round their boots, and the same sea-spray that has coated the rock with ice is dampening her armor and freezing in her hair. Worse than the physical strain of their cramped position is the mental one of being pinned down in such a place, constantly on the alert.

There are a lot of guards. They’re not idle, either; from the glimpses Freyja has caught they seem to be patrolling in front of the compound, the dull gold of their armor glinting occasionally beneath the monotonous white of the sky. “I’ve never understood why they wear such shiny armor,” Eitri murmurs, shifting beside her. “You can see them a mile off.”

“If you were a snotty elf who thought you were the Divines’ gift to Nirn, what color armor would _you_ wear?”

Eitri snorts.

“They’re not ambush fighters,” she says, more seriously. “Doesn’t matter whether you see them coming if they can roast you before they’re inside the reach of your arm. I’d rather fight a big brute covered in plate than a mage with a good grasp of tactics.”

“How do we fight them, then?”

“We don’t,” Freyja says. “Not if we want to live. I’ve cut my way out of some tight corners, but these are well-trained soldiers, not bandit riff-raff. We have to get in and out without being spotted. Killing a few sentries is one thing, but any kind of pitched battle will bring the whole garrison down on us.”

Eitri’s brow furrows. He darts a rather worried glance around the edge of the boulder, and Freyja can’t help but agree with the sentiment. She knows how she would take a keep with Indros – Illusion spells and slit throats, dirty and brutal and quick. She’d be less worried if it came to crossing blades; they’d still be terribly outnumbered, but there’s nothing like a mage at your side when fighting other mages.

This is different. If they get caught, they’re dead; a blacksmith, however determined, and a single sellsword – however experienced – are no match for a fortress full of expert and ruthless magic-users. Eitri is a quick learner, but a week of sporadic practice with a secondhand axe never made anyone a warrior. Nor is Freyja as comfortable working in the shadows as she would like, not for this kind of job. She’s fairly light on her feet, and good at picking locks, but she’s not a professional sneak. She has always been the type to charge in swinging.

“Hey,” she says, to herself as much as Eitri. “Tombs and keeps and what’s inside them haven’t killed me yet.”

“Aye,” he says, and his cold fingers steal up to squeeze her own.

Finally, once it is dark enough that they will not be silhouetted between the snow and the falling twilight, they pick a torturous path up the boulder-strewn slope. It’s covered in little cliffs and slick with ice. Once the shaky grip of Eitri’s weak left hand nearly fails him. Once Freyja curses after sending a loose pebble clattering down the rock face, and for a long time after they lie prone and breathless on the cold stone, afraid to give themselves away with further noise. When they finally reach a good vantage point they’re both sweating. They start to shiver as it dries, but there is little they can do; a fire here would stand out like a beacon. Eitri finds a sheltered space beneath an overhanging rock and they crawl inside, drawing up the hoods of their cloaks and crowding against each other for warmth.

As night deepens they huddle in their hollow on the mountainside, watching specks of orange torchlight make their steady rounds beneath. Freyja follows the movements with a critical eye. “Six guards on patrol,” she finally says. “And a few more at sentry posts. They’re standing four-hour watches, which means there’s around thirty men down there. Probably more, if they’ve got prisoners inside – they’d need a guard on those, too.”

“That’s a lot of Thalmor.” She feels his answer rumble through his chest, pressed up against her shoulderblade. The moisture in his breath ghosts over her ear and makes her shiver. Even sharing body heat, wrapped in cloaks and furs, Freyja is glad of her Nord blood. The storm has cleared, and the night sky is like concentrated ink. The air is stark and cold as a knife to the throat. Light winds are skating down from the peaks, sending new snow scuffing across older crusts of ice.

Eitri shifts behind her. “I still haven’t worked out why you’re doing this.”

“Doing what?” Freyja asks, sleepily. He’s warm, and she’s beginning to nod off against his chest, exhausted by the day’s travel.

“This.” He gestures down at the ominous glow of the torches. “You said it yourself – the Thalmor will be hunting you the rest of your life. And that’s if we make it out of there alive.”

 _I’ve apparently got an appointment with the World-Eater,_ she thinks. _The rest of my life may not be very long._ “Glad to hear you’ve got so much confidence in me,” Freyja says, aloud.

“You know that’s not what I meant.”

It does seem crazy, she supposes – taking on the Thalmor to aid a chance acquaintance. Freyja hasn’t fully examined her motives herself. She just knows she doesn’t want him to walk blindly to his death; perhaps she saved his life, but she feels as if she's the one that owes him something. She recalls his sad, steady gaze, as he asked her who would search for his cousin if he did not. _Because you reminded me what courage is,_ she thinks. Her shrug ends in an involuntary yawn. “Look, the gods practically dropped you in my lap,” Freyja says. “I’m not going to leave the job half-done.”

He elbows her gently in the ribs. “The gods dropped me in _your_ lap, did they?” he asks, shifting pointedly beneath her.

“Mmhm,” she says.

 

* * *

 

The sun casts wavering pink tendrils across the sea long before it climbs over the mountains. As it breaks across the shore below them it colors the crests of the waves like bloody foam, sends flame lancing from the pauldrons of the Thalmor sentries. The elves who arrive to relieve them from their watch exit the keep by a door near its western side, behind the heavily guarded gate to the inner courtyard. There is another, smaller door by a forge in the yard, but it doesn’t seem to be used. A lookout stands facing the sea just above it.

Their vantage point on the mountainside reveals that the keep is half in ruins, settled crookedly into its sandy foundation, topmost tower open to the snow. A wooden stockade fence covers a gap in the northern wall, by the smaller back entrance. That’s encouraging, but Freyja also fears there will be no secret tunnel, no hidden door. The drunken list of the fortress walls suggest it is built on shifting, waterlogged sand. Tunnels need bedrock. At the very least, soil. They’re going to have to sneak in the back door, under the watchful eyes of half a dozen guards.

They try to sleep much of the day, all too aware that motion may draw enemy eyes. Another frigid night falls. Masser and Secunda hang low and huge on the horizon. Freyja looks at the moonlight on the fresh snow and shakes her head. If they move from their shelter tonight, the Thalmor sentries will spot them in minutes.

Another morning dawns. Another night falls. This night, the Divines are with them. As dusk begins to fall so does the snow, and by the time it’s fully dark it’s coming down in sticky wet clumps. “Let’s go,” Freyja says. The storm will play havoc with the guards’ visibility – and assuming they get out alive, Nords will make far better time in a snowstorm than any elves coming after them. Eitri swings his pack onto his back. Freyja draws her sword, sheathes it, draws it again – an old ritual, reassurance that it slides cleanly in the oiled leather. Satisfied, she returns it once more to its place, looking at Eitri. He gives her a grimly determined nod.

 _Kiss for luck?_ breathes a dark sly voice, so close in her ear she nearly starts. Freyja can almost feel teeth nipping her earlobe, slender bony fingers gripping her waist. It’s another pre-battle tradition, and it makes her want to curse. Not now. Not _now_. She glances at Eitri’s full lips, framed neatly by his dark auburn beard. In another hour they could both be dead.

It is easier, in the clarity that always comes before a fight, to admit to herself that she wants to taste him again.

 _No,_ Freyja thinks, but it’s lacking the usual heat. She’s grown too fond of the man. _Not now_ , she compromises. _After we rescue his cousin. To seal our victory_. “I’m going to try breaking in the back entrance,” she says, to distract herself. “By the fence at the gap in the wall. There’s fewer sentries on that side. If we move fast we can mostly stay out of sight.” Eitri nods. “Once we’re inside I’ll take the lead. We’ll probably have to kill a few guards, but I want you to hang back unless I get into trouble. This is all about speed and silence. I don’t want us getting in each other’s way.”

They pick their way down the mountainside and then swing in a wide arc around the keep, trusting the snowfall to conceal them from enemy eyes. On the slender spit of land just north of the fortress, they both pause. Freyja takes a deep breath, eyeing the dull orange glow of torches, the rowboat docked just offshore, the watchman squinting through the storm to the growling black ocean. As they crouch in the slush behind a lanky grove of fir trees, Eitri catches her hand. “Freyja,” he murmurs. “If we don’t—”

“Don’t tempt the gods, man,” she hisses, and returns to contemplating the lone sentry. Freyja is a passable archer, but she does not dare to take the shot in the dark and snow, with gusts of wind roiling in off the sea. She gestures towards the watchman, puts a finger to her lips. Eitri nods.

They’d have no hope, without the storm. The sentries atop the walls are huddled inside their cloaks, hoods drawn up like great fur blinders, too miserable to really patrol. Eitri boosts her over the wall and Freyja lifts the latch. They ghost to the door and flatten themselves against it as Freyja works at the lock; it seems to take a long time. Aside from the wind it is quiet – the eerie, muffled quiet that only a heavy snow can create.

Finally they slip inside. Freyja brushes snowflakes out of her eyebrows, gaze darting about the room. The shadows are very dark. A low doorway yawns ahead of them, above steep stairs leading still lower underground.  Echoing back along the stone is the _plop_ of water. The sound is strangely greasy, mealy-mouthed, as though dripping into pools soft and slick with slime. The place smells of decay.

She glances up in time to see Eitri swallow thickly.

Freyja puts her mouth directly against his ear. “Stay behind me,” she reminds him, so quietly it’s more vibration than sound. Then she draws her dagger and pads down the stairs, into the bowels of the keep.

For a time it’s quiet: the echo of water, the creak of her leather armor. Eitri’s soft breathing at her back. Then the rhythmic, gentle clink of armored boots on stone. Freyja peers around the wall, watches two guards pass in front of one of the L-shaped corners so favored in defensive fortifications. Notes the steady pattern of their patrol. Her hand tightens around her blade.

Freyja has known adventurers who seemed made of night and water, who could cut a man’s throat at table without spilling the wine he sipped. She’s never mastered that sort of elegant shadow dance, but she knows how to kill – and she knows how to do it quick and quiet. The first guard dies before he knows she’s there. The second hears the soft clatter of his armor against the floor and comes to investigate, but the torch in his hand leaves him blind to movement in the deeper shadows. He screams into her hand when she seizes him, struggling, but Freyja buries her blade in his throat and his voice dies away in wet gurgles. Her knees threaten to buckle under his dead weight; Eitri helps her lower him to the floor and then they both pause, listening hard. Nothing. One room cleared.

As they round the corner something crunches beneath her boot. Freyja looks down. There’s a knucklebone on the floor. Behind her Eitri takes a swift breath.

Cells line the walls, the inky darkness within the bars swallowing the torchlight. Eitri shoves past her, peering inside, calling softly. Ragged ghosts stir within. To Freyja’s right a Breton woman stares out at her, the whites of her eyes shining like crescent moons in the black cell, pupils huge in her wasted face. Freyja looks to Eitri, who’s reached the end of the hall. “He’s not here,” Eitri mutters. She can hear the strain in his voice.

Freyja does not want to take one step deeper inside this pit of Oblivion, but she adjusts her grip on the knife. She would feel safer with her sword clutched solidly in hand, but a long blade is not the tool for cutting throats. “We’ll be back for you,” she murmurs, to the half-starved Breton.

The next room is a small armory, lit by red coals burning low in a brazier. Just ahead lies a small side room. To the left a hallway leads deeper into the keep. Another guard sits at a corner table, munching on bread and cheese. As Freyja creeps toward her she swivels her head, eyes narrowing. Freyja claps a hand over her mouth.

The elf leaps to her feet, kicking over the chair; an armored fist slams back against Freyja’s ribs. Freyja’s dagger glances off the cheekguard of her helmet, slips beneath it, sinks into her neck. The dying flail of the guard’s arm sends her plate spinning off the table to clatter on the floor.

“Guard!” snarls an irritated voice from the side room. Strident, carrying tones. A tall robed figure appears around the corner. “I am working. Just _what_ is the meaning of—”

Freyja tackles him: a clumsy lunge that carries them through the doorway and wrenches her shoulder hard when they crash to the stone floor. The mage wheezes, breathless, but when her dagger sweeps toward his ribs he seizes her wrist in a grip like iron. For a moment they grapple, and then his strong long fingers squeeze just right and the blade drops from her nerveless grasp.

A jerk of her knee sends it skittering out of his reach, but now she’s unarmed, and Freyja can _feel_ the magic building just under his skin. When the hand clamped around her wrist flares red with fire it’s all she can do not to howl. Freyja twists viciously, slams a knee up into his groin. For half an instant he goes rigid. She rolls, pins him atop her with both legs and one arm, jerks his head back with the hand she’s clamped around his mouth. The wizard sinks his teeth into her palm. The stormy rush of destruction magic sounds all around her.

“Kill him,” she hisses. “Kyne’s breath, Eitri, kill him!”

Freyja flinches when the axe comes down, a wild stroke that bites deep into the elf’s neck and comes up through his jaw with a jerk, far too close to her own fingers. Her own face. For a moment she lies still, pressing her cheek against the floor. Then she staggers up, panting, guarding her burned wrist against her body. Gouts of the mage’s dark lifeblood stain her neck and shoulder. Eitri’s eye are wide. “ _Freyja_ —”

“It’s not mine,” she gasps. “Don’t drop your guard now, we don’t know who heard that.”

Eitri’s voice is low. “I think they’re used to noises from this room,” he says, and Freyja, for the first time, looks around.

The room stinks of piss and blood and moldering straw - and death. Beneath the low stone ceiling it's almost smothering. A single torch throws long, sputtering shadows across a torture rack, a noose hanging from the ceiling, a shelf of dusty bottles filled with dark, glutinous liquid. Eitri pulls the torch out of its bracket, and as he turns the weak light sweeps across a corpse rotting in its shackles, scraps of flesh and cloth hanging from its bones. Freyja turns away in disgust. Like most Nords - most _anyone_ , really - she loathes the Thalmor on principal, but she's never felt it so viscerally until now. For a moment she shuts her eyes, jaw clenched with impotent rage.

A weak moan slithers out of the darkness.

In an instant Freyja is standing over the justiciar, sword at the ready. It's Eitri who turns to the corner and raises the torch, and Eitri who starts forward with a cry, dropping to his knees beside the man shackled helplessly to the wall. "Freyja! The key," he says, voice tight with urgency.

The prisoner turns his face to the wall, eyes squeezed shut against the torchlight. "What are you doing here?" he spits. Surprisingly hostile. There’s a bloody knife on the table just beside him.

"Rescuing you," says Eitri, as Freyja rifles the justiciar's pockets. "What's your name?"

The man's voice grates like a rusted hinge. "If this is a trick--"

Freyja fishes out the key and seizes the dead elf's robes, wrenching the body into view. "It's not a trick." The prisoner stares for a moment, blinking suspiciously. He reminds her of someone, though she can't think who. Freyja hands off the key and turns to the door, keeping watch as Eitri sets to work on the manacles.

"What's your name?" he repeats.

There's a long pause. "Thorald."

Freyja wheels. "Thorald Grey-Mane?"  
  
"Yes - I - what in _Oblivion_ -" he looks bewildered to the point of tears, unraveling beneath the shock of his unexpected rescue. Then he seems to master himself. "Do I know you?"  
  
"I used to play with your little sister," Freyja breathes, faintly sick. She remembers Thorald as a boy not quite come of age, with a shock of white-blond hair and bulky shoulders that gave the lie to his youthful leanness. When she was twelve she even went through a stage when she was rather tongue-tied around him, though she doubts he remembers her name - he was a good five years older. Now he's barely recognizable. His braids are clumped and dark with grease and blood, his body stringy like a big man who's lost muscle weight too fast. One side of his face is a mass of half-healed bruising, splotched yellow and brown and blue.  
  
He squints at her through the eye that isn't swollen shut. "With Olfina? Wait – no, Torstein and Sonje's little girl, what was your - Freyja?"  
  
She nods.  
  
"I thought - did my family send you?"  
  
"I didn't even know you were missing. We're looking for someone else."

The man crumples back against the wall when Eitri finally releases the shackles, cradling his arms against his chest and hissing as the feeling returns to his fingers. "Who?" he grits.

"My cousin," says Eitri.

"There's a block of cells just outside," Thorald says. "Two - three guards, maybe--"

Freyja shakes her head. "That's where we came in."

Eitri puts a supportive arm behind Thorald's shoulders, clearly torn between helping and pressing for information. "Where else would they keep him?" he pleads.

Thorald shakes his head. "If he's not in those cells, he isn't here - prisoners are all in this wing."

"But how can you be sure? If they've kept you here the whole time--"

"Because there's no screaming from the other wing," Thorald says, harshly.

Eitri swallows. "Please--"

Something in his voice makes the other man open his eyes. Thorald squints intently at him. "Your cousin?” he says. “What did you say his name was?"

"Brokkr."

Thorald bites his lip. "Red hair?"

"Aye.” There’s terrible hope on Eitri’s face. “Real red, darker than mine. Have you seen him? Is he here?"

Thorald's face closes. He nods stiffly, like an old man whose neckbones ache. "He was," he says, and his voice lingers on the second word.

Eitri leaps up, pacing, fevered. "Where is he?"

Thorald exchanges a pained glance with Freyja."He's gone," Thorald says. "I'm sorry."

Eitri doesn't seem to register the implication. "Where? Do you know where they took him?"

"Eitri--" Freyja starts. Thorald looks helplessly at her, and then his eyes flick to the skeleton still hanging in its shackles.  
  
Eitri follows his gaze. For a moment he only stares, utterly motionless, and then he sways on his feet.  
  
Freyja catches him under the arm, certain he's going to fall, but he wrenches brutally out of her grip. "No," he says, whirling on Thorald. "He only went missing two months ago, he can't - how long have you been here?"

"Not sure. It was Sun’s Height when they took me out of Imperial custody."

"And you're still alive," Eitri says. "That isn't--"

"He was wounded when they brought him in," Thorald says, looking like every word pains him. "I truly am sorry, but if you don't want to go the same way--"

"He's right," Freyja says. "Eitri--"

Eitri is on his knees beside the body, heedless of the stench, poking at what is left of its clothing. He must recognize something, because suddenly his face cracks like new ice. He doesn’t make a sound. He only buckles inward.

“I’m sorry,” Thorald says again, wretchedly.

“We have to go,” says Freyja.

Eitri makes a shaky, desperate little gesture, but she can read it well enough. _I can’t just leave him here._

There’s a Talos amulet dangling amongst the bones, and Freyja steps closer, trying to ignore the cloying taste of death in her nose and throat. Picks the amulet free. It’s made of wood, hand-carved, small and rough and vulnerable in her hand. Scooping up Eitri’s wrist, she presses it into his palm. “Eitri,” she murmurs, and folds his fingers around it. Clasps them in her own. “Let’s go.”

He staggers mechanically to his feet, follows them from the room. As they hurry back towards the dungeon Thorald arms himself with one of the elven swords hung on a weapons rack, strips the dead guard of her fur cloak. “Armor?” Freyja prompts, but the man glances down at his wasted body and snorts a laugh.

In the prison Freyja locates a lever that unlocks the cells. “Please,” groans a bearded Nord from one of the cages. “I have to get out of here.”

“That’s the plan,” Freyja says. When the doors swing open the Breton woman comes spilling out, along with an Argonian. But their comrade makes no move to rise. Freyja beckons urgently. “Hurry – we’ve got to move!” He doesn’t answer. Freyja ducks into his cell, wondering if he is injured. “What’s your name?”

The man flinches back, staring vacantly at the wall. He hugs his knees to his chest. His voice is an airless whistle. “I have to get out of here,” he whispers.

Freyja tastes bile. She watches his colorless gaze slide over the bars of his cell, right past the opened door. Then she reaches for the dagger at her belt.

A hand catches her wrist. “You can‘t!”

Freyja looks up. Eitri’s grip is painful, his face deathly white. Freyja’s throat tightens in sympathy, but she shakes her head. “You‘d rather I leave him to the mercy of these bastards?”

He stares at her. “We have to move, Eitri,” she says. “He doesn’t even know his own name - we can‘t carry him to the other side of Skyrim. It’s kinder this way.”

“You would kill a man because he’s inconvenient?” Eitri’s voice is pebbles rumbling over granite; his eyes flash with real anger, a fierceness Freyja has never seen from him. The accusation rouses her own temper.

“I would do what has to be done,” she snaps. “Wait by the door if you can’t stomach it.”

“What if it was his leg that was broken, and not his mind?”

“It’s not the same thing!”

“She’s right,” says Thorald. “It’s a matter of time before they change the guards – we’ve got to get out of here _now_.” Eitri shakes his head. “It’s one life or four,” Thorald rasps. “We can’t save him. If you want to avenge your kin, we’ve got to live out the night first.”

That makes Eitri snarl and stalk for the door, fists clenched at his sides. “Are you headed for Whiterun?” Freyja asks Thorald.

“Aye.”

“Tell those other two to grab warm cloaks and weapons and get ready to head for the shore. There’s a rowboat nearby, and the border of High Rock’s not far. Most Argonians I’ve known were good with boats. If they row through the night they should make it across the border by dawn, and it’ll be a while before the Thalmor can give chase without a second set of oars. We’ll head east and hope the snow throws them off the trail.”

Thorald nods. Glances down at the man in the cell. “Talos guide you,” he mutters, and turns quickly away.

And then Freyja is alone with a dagger in her hand.

Swallowing, she kneels behind the prisoner. The stone is hard and damp and filthy against her knees. When she puts a hand on his shoulder the man huddles into himself, a tiny sound breaking in his throat, and for a moment Freyja has to look away. “Easy,” she says, pressing up against his back. “It’s all right.” With her thumb she kneads at the taut, hunched muscle of his shoulder, murmuring pointless soothing sounds. A voice in her mind is howling the need for urgency, but she cannot bring herself to drag his head up from where he has buried it in his arms.

Eventually he does lift his neck, although he does not relax; instead he fixes his gaze on the opposite wall, hugging his knees to his chest, seeming to will himself elsewhere. Freyja moves her hand to his matted hair, holding him steady. Rests the blade against his throat. It’s the dagger she uses to dress game, and she keeps it lethally sharp.

"We'll meet in Sovngarde, brother," she says, like a prayer. Gods only know if it's true. Freyja isn't certain that a mercy kill in a reeking dungeon counts as a heroic death, but in that moment she thinks it ought to.

She takes a breath, sets her jaw. Hot blood sprays across her fingers.


	6. Knocking On the Walls

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Discussion of physical and psychological torture in this one, folks.

There’s no time to dwell on grief or anger. There’s no time to dwell on anything; they travel through the night, slipping between the pines like shades, with their cloaks drawn up and their heads bent grimly against the wind. Hand in hand, dragging each other along like frightened children. The snow muffles their steps, but the rush of the sea is a constant murmur to their left, just out of sight in the darkness to the north. It leaves Freyja straining her ears for the sounds of pursuit.

Morning dawns pale and cold. Thorald is flagging badly, so they press themselves against the cliff face and curl inside their cloaks. Eitri offers to take the watch, and when he wakes them two hours later his face is set and his eyes are red, though it may only be from squinting into the wind. They press on.

By the time night starts to close around them they are staggering through the drifts; Thorald slips on a slick root beneath the snow, goes to his knees, and does not get up again. Eitri moves forward as if to help, but he does not seem able to work out what to do with his hands. “Enough,” Freyja breathes. “We camp.” Between the two of them they haul Thorald to his feet. “In the trees,” she says. “Set up the tent. I’ll get the water.” Her head is spinning.

They passed water shortly before: just a rivulet tumbling off the edge of a little ravine, but it will do. Freyja drinks directly from the stream. Sits back, hunched over her knees and wiping her mouth; the world rocks gently. Freyja curses herself for a fool. She should know better than to push to exhaustion that way. At the best of times it’s counterproductive. On Skyrim’s north coast, in the falling dark of the year, it can be deadly. And yet the urge to press on is still jittering under her skin. Freyja does not consider herself easily unnerved – she’s seen far too much of the world for that – but there is an unsteady tilt in her guts when she examines last night’s memories. In a puddle filmed with ice she catches a glimpse of herself: freckles stark against the pallor of her face, a dark smear of blood near her hairline. Freyja wonders if it belongs to her or to one of the Thalmor. To the prisoner she killed. She scrubs it quickly away.

By the time she returns with full waterskins Thorald is asleep in the tent, slumped awkwardly sideways over his own lap like a tree brought down by a storm. It looks as though he passed out the moment he sat down. Eitri crouches just inside the door, trying to cover him with a fur cloak. He is fumbling, clumsy, his eyes drifting shut, and Freyja remembers that he hasn’t slept at all.

“Wake him up – get some water in him,” she says to Eitri. “And then get some rest. I’ll take the watch.”

“The man needs to sleep.”

“He needs to drink. He’s weak enough as it is – trust me, nothing makes a man drop faster than thirst. I don’t want him collapsing in the middle of a march.”

“Would you leave him if he did?”

“What?”

“Would you leave him behind? If he collapsed?”

Freyja turns away, biting furiously at the inside of her cheek, reminding herself that the man is grieving and has not slept in thirty hours. “Go to sleep,” she grits out. Eitri crouches behind her for a long time, still and silent, before she hears the soft flap of the hide tent falling closed. The wind sends powder hissing over the snow.

With jerky movements Freyja unsheathes her dagger, squinting in the dusk before giving up and testing the edge by feel. It’s dull, of course. It could hardly fail to be after all the action it saw in Northwatch Keep. She feels the long night’s march as she sinks to the ground, pressing her back to the trunk of a big spruce and pulling her whetstone from its pouch. Drawing her cloak more tightly about her shoulders, she settles in a watchful huddle between two large roots, dagger braced across her knees.

Freyja learned to care for a blade before she learned to wield one, watching her father hone the edge of his hunting knives. His beard smelled constantly of woodsmoke for all the evenings he spent before the firepit keeping the tools of his trade in good repair. Once she learned how, her father used to let her sharpen the smaller of the knives while he fletched arrows. It’s not a task to be rushed or brute-forced, and as she draws the stone across her blade Freyja feels her mind begin to settle, calmed by the repeated sound and the smooth, firm strokes.

For as long as she can remember, she has understood that the Thalmor kill Talos worshippers. Freyja was conceived the night before her father left for Cyrodiil to fight with the Legion; she did not meet him until the end of the Great War, and she still has fuzzy memories of how thin and weary he was. How he clutched her mother and cried. Her mother cried too, which had frightened her. Sonje of Whiterun raised a child alone through three years of famine and war and the very real chance that her husband would never meet his daughter. She had a common name, and in later years citizens of Whiterun would distinguish which Sonje they meant by calling her _the steady one – you know, Torstein’s wife_ – until it almost became a title, like the epithets won in battle. Freyja was too young to grasp any of this at the time, of course, but at three she believed her mother to have the answer to every question and the solution to every hardship. She had never seen her weep. Naturally she regarded the man who provoked such a thing with suspicion. Eventually he released her mother and knelt before her, eyes shining very blue in his weather-darkened face, beard trimmed neat and short in the Colovian style, not full as he wore it for most of the rest of her childhood. Freyja had glanced warily up at her mother’s tear-streaked face, but ultimately she found that she did not have it in her to be afraid of this stranger with his hopeful, heartbreaking, hesitant smile.

Perhaps due to this enforced separation at its inception, theirs was a tight-knit family. Her parents never made a secret of the fact that they still worshipped Talos, but neither did they make a secret of the fact that discretion was literally a matter of life and death. At six Freyja made a playmate cry, wondering matter-of-factly why men still trailed their fingers over the shrine as they passed the statue in the square when they could be killed for it. The neighbor woman had been none too happy – _it’s not a subject to discuss with children_ , she had said – but Sonje did not back down. _She needs to know_ , her mother had said. _They all need to know._

So Freyja knows, and always has. She’s seen the truth of it all over Tamriel. In Hammerfell she heard stories about the vicious guerrilla war in the years after the Concordat, stories that made her stomach turn. She met a tavern keeper with an easy, jovial manner and half his face burned away, skin melted and shining and woven with the intricate twisting tendrils of magical fire. She’s seen the ruin of Bruma’s Great Chapel. And she still worships the warrior’s god, but “By the Eight” falls easily from her lips, an old and cautious habit.

None of it prepared her for the brutality on display in the dripping dark of Northwatch Keep. She can still taste death at the back of her throat. She can still feel the scalding pulse of blood across her fingers.

(Another thing she saw in Hammerfell: a greying warrior in the traditional dress of the Alik’r, straight-backed and whip-thin in a dignified sort of way, whose horse had broken a leg when a cartful of heavy wine barrels overturned in a narrow alley. The creature was writhing piteously. Tears rolled silently down its master’s face as he drew his sword, and everyone walking past was pretending not to see him.)

She is afraid. She was a fool not to be afraid before. But she is also angry, and not only at the Thalmor. Her jaw clenches hard as she thinks back to Eitri’s words. Of course she wouldn’t leave Thorald, if he collapsed. Freyja takes a deep breath, forces herself to relax her grip on the whetstone lest she notch her blade. There is a difference between abandoning a man to his fate and giving mercy when it is all that is left to give. She has never done such a thing before, but she would do it again, if given the choice. Whether it made Eitri angry or no. The damn fool.

Freyja wonders briefly how much of her anger is righteous outrage and how much is frustrated longing. She’d forgotten she was alone until a man on his own lonely quest edged up against the fringes of her life, like the brush of shoulders in a narrow tent. She’d liked him, with his homespun bravery and self-deprecating humor. And she wants camaraderie now, with the recent pitiless reminder that she is far better at ending lives than saving them, but she’s not like to get it. _So much for that victory kiss_ , she thinks. Freyja has rarely felt less victorious.

 

* * *

 

After that initial mad flight, their pace slows to a more sustainable one. The stark beauty of the coastline is still more striking beneath a coating of new snow, but Freyja can no longer appreciate it; the terrain leaves them terribly exposed, trapped between the flat grey sea and the unforgiving wall of the mountains. Freyja is absurdly grateful for the blizzard that erased any initial traces of their footsteps. Wary of pursuit, they continue to snatch sleep in five and six-hour increments. There’s only room for two in the tent, but none of them is keen to sleep without a watchman anyway, not with the spectre of Northwatch dungeon padding along behind them. Thorald has an alarming tendency to twitch awake and stare at the tent roof with fixed pupils and rigid limbs, stiff and still and breathless as a corpse. Trapped in some brutal memory. It’s an inescapable reminder of what awaits them should the Thalmor track them down.

They speak little. Months of ill treatment have left Thorald weak, and he toils along with his head hung miserably between his shoulders, dumb with exhaustion. Eitri, by contrast, stalks through the snow like a bear just emerged from its winter den. Freyja is reluctant to disturb either of them for conversation.

She worries about the ground near Solitude. Their headstart serves them well now, as they weave through fir and scrub or pick their way over the rocky, tide-scoured coast – terrain too rough for even Skyrim’s hardy horses. But their course funnels them to the narrow spit of land beneath Solitude’s Great Arch. It’s a natural choke point. For some two miles they will be forced to walk one of Haafingar’s main roads, the only escape to scale a sheer cliff or swim the broad, burly shoulders of the Karth River, with its swift tidal current dangerous even for ships. If they turn aside now they might avoid it. But they’ll lose a full day just making the climb into the mountains, especially with Thorald in the shape he’s in; once they top out on the ridgeline they’re sure to encounter frost trolls, ice wraiths, and – most dangerous of all – the road. Wild and weatherbeaten as it is, the narrow track will have travelers, and quite possibly Thalmor search parties. And it will take them closer to the Embassy.

They’ve no choice but to hold their present course. Freyja just hopes there’s not a party of justiciars waiting for them.

If nothing else, it is rewarding to watch Thorald grow slightly stronger as they travel. When he isn’t angry Eitri is closed and quiet, but he makes it his mission to ration out little chunks of smoked fish and dried snowberries to the other man throughout the day, taking care never to let Thorald’s shrunken stomach deal with too much food at one time. One morning, as they are packing away the tent and Eitri is filling the waterskins, Thorald glances up at her. “So – Olfina’s old playmate.” He gives her a haggard smile. “You used to be all arms and legs and temper. I don’t actually think I’ve thanked you.”

Freyja flushes in spite of herself. “It’d take a harder heart than mine to leave a man in that pit,” she says, tersely. “A Whiterun man, at that. How is Olfina these days?”

“Well enough, when last I saw her.” Thorald clenches helpless fists, voice quiet. “I don’t really know.”

“How long have you been locked up?”

“What day is it?”

Freyja counts on her fingers. “It’s the ninth of Sun’s Dusk.”

“Just over three months, then.” He shakes his head. “It seemed longer.”

From what she’s seen, three months in a Thalmor dungeon is plenty long enough. “Jarl Balgruuf seems to do a good job of keeping the justiciars out of Whiterun, else that mad priest in the square would be long dead,” Freyja says. Uneasily, she thinks of the shrine above White River Gorge, the one her mother used to take her to. “How’d you end up a prisoner?”

“My brother and I joined up with the Stormcloaks,” Thorald says. “I was captured in a skirmish outside Morthal. They brought the prisoners back to Solitude, and…I don’t even know what happened, truly. Can’t have been more than ten minutes after walking into the city that the Thalmor showed up, demanding I be turned over to them.”

“The Legion just gave you up?” Freyja asks. Thorald spits bitterly, and eloquently, into the snow.

“I don’t think they had a choice,” he says, looking moody. “Tullius himself got involved – they had a signed order from the Embassy. The general looked like he’d taken a sip of a bad batch of mead.”

Freyja shakes her head. “What did they want with you?”

Thorald’s face twists briefly, as though she has gripped an old wound in iron fingers. “I don’t know,” he says. “At first they accused me of being a Stormcloak, a secret Talos worshipper. But they already knew I was a Stormcloak, else the Legion wouldn’t have had me. They just…wanted a confession. To what it didn’t matter, they simply wanted me to admit to something. I think they wanted to break me. Use me as a way to get to the rest of the Grey-Mane family.” He lifts his chin, pale and defiant. “I gave them no such pleasure.”

Freyja considers. “But what would they want with the Grey-Manes?”

“My father is the best smith in Tamriel,” Thorald says, without conceit.

“Hmm.” Freyja doesn’t think the Thalmor have any use for Nordic steel, not even from the Skyforge. She lashes the tent to her pack and stands, kicking her filthy boots against a tree. The early-season snow is growing slushy after several warm days and turning the ground to mud. “I’m glad we happened upon you, for what it’s worth.”

“I won’t say I’m disappointed. Though I could do with Hulda’s roast goat and a bottle of Honningbrew’s finest, after three months of that place. And maybe a pretty girl to serve them up? Something to keep in mind next time you stage an impossible rescue.”

Freyja laughs, startled. It echoes loudly in the morning air, and she sees Eitri glance towards them as he emerges from the woods with the newly filled waterskins. “They didn’t starve out your sense of humor.”

“I’m happy to be alive,” he says, quietly. “I didn’t think I’d ever see the sky again. I owe you far more than I can repay.”

“Don’t be a fool. Did you expect us to leave you there? It was nothing.” Freyja sighs. “At least someone got out alive.”

Thorald considers for a moment. He darts a sideways glance at Eitri. “He’ll come ‘round, you know,” Thorald says, lowering his voice. “I’ve seen worse lovers’ quarrels.”

“We aren’t lovers,” Freyja says, too quickly. He looks surprised, which makes her scowl. “What?”

“It’s just – nevermind,” Thorald backpedals, as her frown deepens. “At any rate, you did the right thing.”

Freyja swallows. “Did I?”

“Of course you did.” He puts a hand on her forearm. “He was past saving, the poor bastard. Maybe we could have gotten him out of there in body, but not in mind. If it had been me—” he shudders. “I’d have thanked you.”

It’s absurd that he’s comforting her over it. Freyja recalls the sunny youth he once was, and abruptly remembers why she developed such a silly selective muteness in the presence of her best friend’s handsome elder brother. She glances over at him, half-starved and bruised and earnest. It seems even the Thalmor couldn’t beat the kindness out of him. “Thank you,” she says, heartfelt.

He shrugs, echoing her. “It’s nothing.”

As they finish packing up camp Freyja glances again at Eitri. He looks terrible, she realizes: his eyes are dull and distant, ringed beneath with ashy half-moons, and his mouth has the same hard set as a man forced to limp along on a broken ankle. Freyja feels a tiny twist of guilt. She has been avoiding him, knowing that he’s angry with her, but his wordless grief is so palpable she can taste it. The man is an orphan, she recalls. His cousin was his last remaining family. “Eitri,” she says, and he cuts his eyes in her direction.

Freyja squirms a little when he meets her gaze; she’s not very good at comfort. “I’m sorry about your—”

Eitri’s shout makes her turn, and it is only years of finely honed reflexes that save her from being the sabrecat’s next meal.

Freyja dives and rolls, already scrambling to her feet as the cat’s lunge carries it past her. Thorald has the glass sword that he stole from his dead guard in hand; Eitri has shoved the other man behind him, feet planted in a protective stance, his own axe drawn. The cat roars, prowling uncertainly. Clearly it expected easier prey. Then Freyja watches its yellow eyes narrow upon Thorald, picking out the weakest member of the party with a born predator’s instinct. With a long, gurgling snarl, it steps forward – and springs. Eitri leaps between them. He has just enough time to bring up his axe before he falls, with six hundred pounds of brindled fur atop him.

Freyja is already running. She plunges her sword to the hilt beneath the animal’s ribs as Thorald hacks at its muscled neck. Eitri groans and she rips her blade free, ready for another blow, but to her surprise the creature is limp and twitching, Eitri’s own blade lodged in the roof of its mouth. He is gasping for air, flat on his back beneath the enormous cat, but otherwise he looks unharmed.

It must have started stalking him in the woods and then followed him back to camp. After he filled the waterskins, most likely, or it would have leaped on his back as he crouched beside the stream. He’s very lucky. All of them are, Thorald most of all. Eitri probably saved his life. The sabrecat would have torn him open; the man has nothing but a thick fur cloak that might have defended him against the beast’s vicious claws. They are sunk so deeply into Eitri’s hardened leather armor that Freyja has to pry them loose before he can get up.

“That’s two life-debts I owe you,” Thorald says faintly, but Eitri just shakes his head, still heaving desperately for breath.

When they get moving at last, Freyja drops back to walk beside Eitri. A wire-thin line of blood is beading along the side of his throat, just below his left ear. “Are you all right?” she asks.

“Fine.”

“You’re bleeding,” she says, reaching for the livid graze on his neck. He jerks fiercely away from her hand.

Freyja stiffens. “Are we going to do this all the way back to Ivarstead?”

The name of his hometown does not seem to soothe his temper; he bristles like a wolf at bay, mouth set in tight line. “I can find my own way back to Ivarstead.”

“And I never leave a job half-done.”

“It’s not a job,” he says, through gritted teeth. “I’m not paying you.”

“I promised to bring you home.”

“Home.” He snorts bitterly through his nose.

“Look, I am _sorry_ about your cousin. And as for the other fellow, I don’t like it any more than you do, but that’s just how it is.”

“A man is dead and that’s all you have to say?”

“Yes,” Freyja snarls. “Sorry to disappoint you. I’m not a hero. I’m just a sellsword, and I can’t save the whole world.”

“We could have tried.”

“Go to Oblivion. I would have tried if there had been any chance at all, but there wasn’t, and I’m not going to weep and wail over something that couldn’t be helped. I am a killer,” she says, frank and fierce. “Look at me and tell me that that isn’t what you see. Look at every scratch on my armor. Look at every notch in my shield. You think the jarl hires me to walk into a bandit camp alone and talk the bastards down? You think men pay me just to crawl through some damp cavern after trinkets like an alchemist’s assistant after mushrooms? Men pay me to kill. If you want a woman with a soft heart for a hopeless cause, find a pretty tavern bard without scars on her face.”

“You made it very clear that it doesn’t matter what kind of woman I want.”

“That’s not what I meant!”

Even as she says it Freyja wonders if it’s true. She steadies her voice with an effort. “What is it that you want from me? Because if it’s an apology for doing what any warrior would have known needed doing, you aren’t going to get it.”

“I want you to let me be.” He adjusts his pack with a jerk, striding brusquely ahead.

 _Ungrateful bastard._ Freyja watches him stalk away, the carriage of his shoulders high and stiff. Calls after him. Her voice is clear on the cold air. “I could’ve, you know,” she says. “Let you be. There on the road, with the Thalmor.”

He pauses, one knee bent, foot not quite fully placed back down in the snow. He does not look around. Freyja watches the back of his head while wind ruffles his tawny hair, the fur of his cloak. When his voice comes it is quiet. “Maybe you should’ve,” he says, and strides off along the beach.

After that Freyja stops trying. The coast grows rockier, pierced through like an archer’s dummy with jagged clefts and coves. With each passing day her apprehension about approaching the capital grows. When the Solitude Lighthouse looms before them as they round a steep little bluff, she pauses.

Thorald glances at her. “What’s wrong?”

“We’ll strike the road in a couple miles,” says Freyja. “I won’t feel safe until we’re off it, and well out of this hold.”

“It’s been days since we had sight of anyone,” Thorald says. “We had a good headstart – I know I’ve slowed you down, but do you really think they can catch us? They’d have done it by now.”

“They don’t need to catch us. They only need to guess which way we’ve gone. There’s a good reason folk in Dragonbridge fear the war. Without that bridge you’ve got to go twenty miles upstream to cross the Karth; downriver there is no crossing, short of a boat or a swim. And I wouldn’t swim that river with a full pack, not for a hundred septims. It’s not very wide there, but it’s deep and rocky, and damned fast. If they’ve any sense for the lay of the country they can cut over the mountains and get there first – and that’s if they haven’t blocked the roads past Solitude. Short of a few mountain passes into the Reach, there’s only one way out of Haafingar by land.”

“They won’t know for sure we’ve gone that way.”

“They can make a guess,” Freyja says. “You don’t go over the mountains with an injured man, and you don’t head for Markarth when you’re running from the Thalmor.”

He shakes his head, seeing the sense of it. “I know what the salmon feel like, watching the net close in.”

“I’m hoping we can find a fisherman at the Solitude docks to ferry us over the river, funny enough.”

“Freyja,” warns Eitri, as they crest another broken rise.

Below them, so well hidden that it appears as if by magic, looms a great sea-going ship, with the curved prow and shielded sides so favored by Nordic shipwrights. Freyja is no sailor, but she spent enough time in the ports of Hammerfell to see that it has nimble lines, and that the men bustling about the deck are preparing to cast off. She spots a crateful of furs, and another of jumbled weapons. It doesn’t take much to see that her crew is up to no good, moored in a hidden cove when the Solitude harbor is so close. A sudden idea strikes her. “That could work,” Freyja muses, almost to herself.

Thorald looks at her, brow furrowed. “What – oh. No. They’re pirates, Freyja!”

“They look more like smugglers to me.”

“What’s the difference? They’re as likely to sell us to the Thalmor as smuggle us to safety.”

“Oh, they’ll sell us out in an instant, but hopefully by then we’ll be halfway across Skyrim.” Freyja strides forward, determined, and hops down a short ledge. Eitri follows, and Thorald shakes his head, bringing up the rear. “We’re bandits, by the way,” she says, as they clamber down the rocks. “If they think we’re on the right side of the law, they won’t give us the time of day.”

“We certainly look the part,” says Thorald, running a hand through his stringy hair. All three of them are grimy and worn from a week on the run.

A sharp-eyed scout spots them as they reach the bottom of the hill. “Grushnag,” mutters the sailor, over his shoulder.

Immediately an orc, dressed like a dandy but painted like a warrior, comes stalking down the gangplank. “Enough! We’re headed for Dawnstar. You can tell Erikur he’ll see his shipment when we see his coin, and not bef- who in the name of Malacath are you?”

“Not who you were expecting, I take it.”

His hand drifts to the mace at his hip. “If you’re smart, you’ll turn around and forget you were ever here.”

Freyja lifts her hands, empty palms outward. “We’re not looking for trouble.”

“I don’t care if you’re looking for it – you’ve found it if you don’t walk away. Sayed,” he growls, and a wiry Redguard on deck nocks an arrow.

“Even if you stand to make some coin? We only want passage to Dawnstar. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?"

“This ain’t a passenger vessel for noblemen, sweetie,” he sneers.

Freyja gives him her fiercest stare. “Then it’s a good thing I’m not a noble, isn’t it?”

He’s quiet for a long, tense moment. Freyja continues to stare him down; orcs in general respond well to bravado. Out of the corner of her eye she watches the smuggler on deck, waiting with his half-drawn bow.

“Go get the captain,” the orc finally barks, to one of his crew.

The captain turns out to be an old Nord named Volf, with a long grey beard and a wicked scar just beneath his left eye, red and raised and curved like a fishhook. He takes one look at them and steeples his fingers under his grizzled chin. “What are you running from?”

“The double-crossing son of a whore who took over my gang,” Freyja says, without missing a breath. “We had a good operation going before he staged his mutiny.” The captain just smiles at her.

“I’ve got a sense for people,” he says. “You’re no common bandit, lovely - I can see that just by looking at you. Why are you really in such a hurry?”

Freyja pauses for only a beat; men like him can scent weakness. “Got me,” she shrugs, and then winks at him. “I’m a jailbreaker - someone hired me to pull these sorry louts out of a cell.”

“Who?”

She scoffs. “A moment ago you were telling me I looked like a professional.”

His grin shows a gold tooth. “Fair enough. You any good?”

“I got them out of Castle Dour, didn’t I?”

“Maybe you did and maybe you didn’t. Where else you work?”

 _Careful_ , Freyja thinks. She’s willing to bet he’s familiar with the inside of several prisons, and ready to grill her on what they look like. “Markarth,” she says.

He laughs. “Now I know you’re lying. No one escapes Cidhna Mine.”

“I did. Or didn’t you hear? I’d have thought a man like you would know the latest rumors.”

The captain regards her with new respect. “I did hear about a breakout, a few months ago,” he says. Then he smiles again, slyly. “If you’re so good, you must have plenty of coin.”

_Damn._

“Aye,” she says, “and I’m not in a hurry to donate it to the jarl’s coffers. You think I carry a load of gold on me when I’m aiming to get myself jailed, you’re a much bigger fool than I took you for.”

He smiles again. “How much do you have?”

In the end he takes every coin they have between them. Later, below deck, Freyja shrugs, settling into a pile of straw between crates in the hold. There are no empty berths for them, so it will have to do. “I’ve been poor more than once, but I’ve never been to Thalmor prison. And having seen one, I don’t intend to start.”

They can’t really argue with that. “Cidhna Mine, though,” Thorald says. “Where did you come up with that story?”

“It wasn’t a story.”

“You didn’t really break out of Cidhna Mine!”

"No, I did.” He raises an eyebrow. “What? I hadn’t done anything - it was a cover-up, some arrangement between one of the Silver-Bloods and the leader of the Forsworn. I had to go through him to get out, actually."

“The Forsworn are magic users, and dangerous ones. How in Oblivion did you manage that?”

“With a small, sharp blade between the ribs,” Freyja says, dryly - though she thinks better of it, when Thorald makes a choking noise and she recalls that he remembers her when she was six. “He had it coming, believe me.”

It’s at that moment that Eitri stands, wordless, and walks out. The door shudders in its frame when it slams behind him.

The ship shifts and groans, a small puddle at the bottom of the hold sloshing. Freyja glares at the low tarred beams above them. Thorald shifts awkwardly. “Like I said, he’ll come ‘round,” he says. For a moment it’s silent. “Someone ought to bring him back,” he adds. “I don’t trust these pirates worth a Riften dice game.”

“I don’t think he wants to talk to me.”

“I’ll go.”

“Thanks.”

“I owe him that,” Thorald says, voice low. “His brother—”

“Cousin.”

“Whatever.” His voice is rough. “He was in the cell next to mine. I could see him walk by when they took him for interrogation, the red hair was easy to spot. When they dragged him back I’d knock on the wall, and he’d knock back, on the other side, let me know he was alive – he did the same when it was my turn. I waited – gods know how long, once, before I heard from him, I think he was unconscious, or maybe he just didn’t have the strength. But eventually he always knocked back. They wouldn’t let any of us talk, but we had our little code. It made you want to stay alive. You didn’t like to think of the other fellow knocking and knocking, and not getting an answer.” Thorald swallows. “Well, the guards caught us at it. They chained us up in the interrogation room and left us, and he was already bad, he was dying, but for two days I sat across the room and watched it happen. That’s the only reason I knew his name – that’s the first time we ever spoke. Funny, right? That you can make friends with a man, and never speak to him.”

Freyja stares at him, feeling winded. Thorald just plunges on, as though he cannot stop the words now that they’ve begun to tumble out. “Like I said – he was dying. But they wouldn’t have done that to him, if not for me.”

Freyja finds her voice. “You don’t know that.”

“Of course I do,” he growls. “I told you – they wanted to break me. They would have killed him anyway, I know that. But they strung him up by the wrists and let him die in his chains because they wanted me to watch him sweat and shake and rave with fever from fifteen feet away, and not even be able to give him a sip of water. And then they just left him there to rot. Because they wanted that corpse staring back at me every time they brought me in for another torture session.”

“ _Divines_ ,” Freyja breathes, dry-mouthed. “Whatever you do, don’t tell him that story.”

“Do you think I’m thick? I just—” Thorald swallows again. “He shouldn’t be alone.”

Imagining him shackled to the wall, left alone with the decaying body of a friend and a festering guilt over the manner of his death, Freyja concludes that Thorald is probably an authority on that subject.

 _A party of three, and every one of us alone_ , she thinks, as she settles back against the groaning hull of the ship. _Divines, what a fucking mess we’re in_.　

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I'm sure you've already realized, I've tried to make the scale of Skyrim more realistic in this story than it is in the game. It might get kind of annoying to play if it took a week of travel time to get from Solitude to Northwatch in-game, but if I made it only a day's walk in the story it would be a little silly; that's practically a third of Skyrim's northern coastline they have to traverse. The same reasoning applies to the difficulties with climbing mountains and crossing rivers. 
> 
> I've tried not to make things too arbitrary (for anyone who's wondering, I started with the assumption that Skyrim is roughly the size of Iceland, because it kind of makes sense and because they're close to the same shape, which makes guesstimating easier). Hopefully it makes sense to the readers.


	7. Memory and Nightmare

Their first night aboard ship, a storm whips up. All three of them are seasick; the smugglers watch them heave over the rails with thinly veiled amusement while Freyja silently vows never to leave land again, as though seafaring is a vice like Colovian brandy. The remaining two days are calm, but gloomy. The tarry, low-ceilinged hold is oppressive, and Freyja tries to spend time on deck, away from the ribbed hull like the belly of some monstrous whale. Away from Eitri. He has been more subdued than snappish ever since he spoke with Thorald, but Freyja is still simmering over his words. It irks her to see the instant friendship that has sprung up between her companions. Eitri practically hovers over the other man, determined to nurse him back to health, and Thorald engages in constant murmured conversations whenever Eitri seems inclined to brood. Freyja knows the bond is fueled by guilt on both sides, shared grief for a man that neither of them could save, but she resents it all the same. It is not fair that she alone should bear the brunt of Eitri’s rage when she’s done nothing to deserve it.

So she avoids the hold. A few of the sailors aren’t bad sorts, though they’re unmistakably rogues. Sayed the Redguard archer is young and rather talkative, with an impressively colorful vocabulary for describing Skyrim’s weather. Freyja likes him in spite of herself. She keeps a wary eye on some of the others, suspecting they’re murderers or worse, but apparently she herself radiates enough of a dangerous air that they leave her alone. Mostly she just stays out of their way, watching the mist-shrouded coastline to the south and the sea like sullen, rolling iron to the north. Occasionally a pitted chunk of gray-green ice floats by.

Undoubtedly reluctant to reveal whichever furtive cove they use as a hideaway, the smugglers put them off several miles west of Dawnstar. There’s nothing to do but continue trudging east. It’s a grey, windy afternoon. No snow is falling, but now and then a gust whips up a stinging fog of icy powder from atop the snowdrifts. It’s in the midst of one of these miniature gales that they hear a distant scream of rage. “Thief!”

Freyja shades her eyes. In that moment a fur-clad shape comes pelting over the nearest rise; he skids to a halt when he spots them, rusty iron in one hand and the gleam of jewelry in the other. There is panic in his eyes, the sort of desperation that makes even the scrubbiest bandit dangerous. When he moves to raise his blade Freyja levels her own at his throat.

He hurls the bauble at her face and runs, clearly deciding it isn’t worth the effort. Clouds of snow trail at his heels. Bemused, Freyja sheathes her sword and kneels, feeling around in the snow. After a moment she comes up with a necklace. It’s a silver disk of curious craftsmanship, inlaid with pale, glowing mother-of-pearl. She passes a thumb over its smooth surface. The pendant is still warm.

With a clank of steel a Khajiit bursts into sight, sweating visibly in his heavy plate, ears flat against his head and eyes spitting blue-green fire. “Which way did that landless scum go? Kharjo is going to gut him!”

Freyja tips her head toward the snowy hills. “He went that way,” she says, dangling the amulet from her fingers. “I assume this is yours?”

“ _Ah_ ,” gasps the Khajiit, snatching it from her hand. “This was given to me by my mother when I was just a cub. It is my only memory of home in this cold land.” He speaks with the throaty, rolling accent that Freyja cannot help but liken to a purr. It makes her smile. Thorald and Eitri are hanging back a little, wary, but even their lips twitch when he slips the amulet back over his head, with a very contented and very catlike arch of his neck. Eitri puts his hand to his collarbone, where his cousin’s Talos amulet hangs hidden beneath his armor.

“But I see not all Nords are as cold as the snows,” their new acquaintance says, and makes Freyja a Khajiiti bow, with its strange little flourish of the tail. “Kharjo is at your service, Ra’Shurh.”

Khajiit are always so terribly charming when they wish to be. Freyja shrugs, smiling. “My pleasure.”

“You are heading for Dawnstar, yes?” Freyja nods. The Khajiit hesitates. “You will walk with us?”

Deserved or no, the caravans have an unsavory reputation amongst traditional Nords. Her comrades will probably be shocked if she accepts. _Let them be shocked_ , Freyja thinks, rather vindictively.

So that’s how they finally limp into Dawnstar: surrounded by the grey dusk and the warm, incomprehensible sound of the caravan members bantering in Ta’agra. At the outskirts of the city the Khajiit fling down their packs, erecting tents and with the near-magical swiftness of career nomads. Kharjo presses a small coin pouch into her hand. “A thousand thanks, Nord,” he says, with a whiskery grin. As they walk into the city the crackling of a fire and the notes of a strange flute drift after them: a mournful, wavering sound, like the wind moaning through a rocky canyon.

“So that’s a Khajiit caravan. They aren’t like I expected,” murmurs Eitri.

“They usually aren’t,” Freyja says, shortly.

Kharjo’s gratitude won’t make her a wealthy woman, but it’s enough to cover dinner and a room at the inn – a welcome surprise, as Freyja expected to spend half the evening splitting logs to feed the innkeeper’s firepit, in exchange for hot meals and warm beds. It would be safer to spend the night in their tent. But with several hundred miles between themselves and Northwatch Keep, she feels justified in taking a breather – and they need supplies for the road. Their last meal was a sad handful of dried snowberries each, and hunting for their dinner will slow them down considerably. Game will be scarce. Evening Star’s not yet arrived, but the northern reaches of the Pale are already locked in winter’s icy claws.

For an extra coin the innkeeper is happy to heat a bath. Freyja leaves Thorald and Eitri at the bar while the man and his daughter drag a wooden tub into the room they’ve rented. Like those in so many rustic inns it does not have doors, but the tub is tucked out of sight in the far corner and Freyja sinks gratefully into the steam, submerged all the way to her chin. The grime that clouds the bathwater when she’s finished doesn’t bear thinking about. She always feels naked and strange without her armor, but she can’t bear to put it back on when her skin still feels tight and clean; instead she slips into her tunic of blue-grey wool and simple farmboy’s leggings, with their crossed stitches up the sides. Then she slides her boots and belt back on. And her sword, of course.

The men have retreated to a shadowed corner of the tavern, where they sit with empty bowls and half-filled mugs. Freyja is glad to see they’ve the sense to avoid drawing the crowd’s attention. Patrons of village inns often gravitate to travelers, eager to hear the latest news. With its deep harbor Dawnstar likely sees plenty of unfamiliar faces, but the war is bound to have disrupted the trade from Solitude, and with it the steady flow of sailors. Thorald catches her eye and gives her a wordless nod. Standing, he downs the last of his ale and makes for the room, stopping to ask the innkeeper for new bathwater.

Freyja turns toward Thorald’s empty seat – and then hesitates. Eitri is studying her with a crease between his brows, looking oddly lost. She scrapes a hand self-consciously through her hair, still damp and loose from the bath. It’s very soft, as it always is following the first wash after a long and dirty march. With a jerk she turns for the bar to order her dinner.

There’s an animated argument going on around the firepit. “I tell you, I saw it,” says a craggy old Nord wrapped in furs. “Big as the inn, and as black as a storm. It flew along the ridge. Up into the mountains. Ask Sorcha, she’ll tell you.”

A dark scrap of a huntress in the corner looks irritated at being made the center of attention, but she confirms his story. “Dragon, all right,” she says, shortly. Then she goes back to shaping an arrow, with a decisive flick of her horn-handled seax.

“It’ll be long gone by now,” barks another man.

“And if it’s not?” A woman in miner’s clothes plays nervously with the handle of her tankard.

“Best start praying to Akatosh,” says another. “No walls, no catapults, and everything’s made of wood.”

“Don’t forget Skald sent half the guard to fight for Ulfric,” mutters a third.

“Divines’ sakes, all of you.” An elderly woman swivels in her seat by the bar, where she’s been chatting with the innkeeper’s daughter. “That pass is thirty miles away, at least, and the dragon much further than that. It’s probably flown off toward Mount Anthor.”

“We could use another Olaf One-Eye, if that’s the case.”

“And the Greybeards have called the Dragonborn,” says the woman. “Even _my_ old deaf ears heard that, Leigelf.”

“Bread and stew,” Freyja mutters to the innkeeper, while an Imperial scoffs. “That’s naught but a story. Age-old Nord nonsense!”

“Did you not hear it, then?” says the old woman.

“We all heard it. But who’s to say he answered? Who’s to say there _is_ one to answer?”

“They say the Whiterun guards slew a dragon.”

“Well done them – doesn’t make’em Dragonborn.”

The argument continues as Freyja tosses a coin on the bar and slips back to the corner table, head down. She’s so lost in her thoughts that the voice at her elbow startles her. “Did you hear it?” Eitri murmurs.

“Hear what?”

“The Greybeards,” he says. “When they called the Dragonborn.”

Freyja pauses, spoon hanging over her bowl. “I heard it,” she says, after a moment.

“I thought it was thunder, at first,” he says. His elbows are braced on the table, one hand rubbing at the nape of his neck while he looks off toward the fire. It’s the first time he’s begun a conversation with her in days. Freyja is not sure what to say. _I knew it wasn’t thunder. I thought Whiterun’s gatehouse would come down around my ears. I’d just helped slay a dragon and I could still taste hot metal and raw power at the back of my tongue._

_It’s me they summoned like some kind of fabled hero, and I’m nothing but a sellsword._

She settles for saying nothing. It’s probably better that way; if they spoke she might say something she’d regret, still quietly furious over his refusal to see reason in her decisions. Instead Freyja fills the silence with a mouthful of horker meat. It’s incredibly rich after weeks of trail rations, swimming in a thick broth of roast tomatoes and garlic and its own grease, and the steady way she spoons it down is due as much to real hunger as to the desire to avoid conversation. By the time Eitri goes to take his turn in the bath she’s mopping up the stew with a heel of bread.

“Hungry, were you?”

Thorald slides onto the bench beside her. When Freyja turns to greet him she raises an eyebrow. “You look…better.”

He looks like a different man, in truth. Still too thin, with greying yellow bruises splashed in a lurid circle round his left eye and cheek, like Reachman war paint. But his hair is clean and unbraided, his skin free of filth and sweat. The stark angles of his cheeks and the fading black eye make him look a bit disreputable, but no longer pitiable.

“You should have seen yourself,” Thorald says, teasing.

“No doubt.” She takes another bite of bread.

“It isn’t you he’s angry with, you know.”

With her mouth full of the dense, crusty loaf, Freyja has to chew deliberately before answering. When she does her voice is flat. “Really.”

“He told me about how you freed him. Took on three justiciars, he said.”

Freyja shrugs. “He got the third himself.”

“Still.”

“And I’m supposed to be glad – what? That he knows I saved his life? He’d be an idiot if he didn’t.”

“Gods, woman,” says Thorald, suddenly terse. “His only family is dead back in that—”

“He’s not the only one who’s ever lost someone,” Freyja snaps. “And he wants me to be something I’m not. He’s alive because I’ve spent the better part of ten years selling my sword arm all over Tamriel, and I’m alive because I don’t hesitate when something needs doing. He can’t have it both ways. I’m not some sort of noble wandering heroine out of a ballad.”

“No one’s asking you to be.”

Freyja looks up at the bar, where the patrons are still arguing about dragons, and snorts.

“Look, just give him a chance,” Thorald says. “It’ll be a long, silent walk back to Ivarstead if you don't."

“He can find his own way back, according to him,” says Freyja, mulishly, but her heart isn’t in it. She’s got to go to Ivarstead anyway, if she’s to finally heed the Greybeards’ call. A stubborn fool Eitri may be, but he was right about one thing: no one else would have looked for his cousin if he had not, and wishing her fate on someone else will not make it so. She should have gone to the Greybeards a long time ago. And she’ll be damned if she’ll let the man be recaptured by the Thalmor, or even fall to a bandit ambush, after the effort she’s put into keeping him alive. So to Ivarstead it is. Freyja shakes her head, sick of talking about it.

“Or you could come to Windhelm with me,” Thorald says.

Freyja looks up quickly. Thorald tilts his head, regarding her, elbows braced earnestly on the table. “You’re going back to the Stormcloaks, then?” Freyja asks.

“Aye. I swore my blood and honor to Ulfric’s cause, and that was before...before.” Something raw and haunted sparks in Thorald’s eyes, so close to the surface that he blinks and swallows it down. Freyja nods. She’s heard some deeply unsettling things about Ulfric himself, but the idea that the Legion would simply hand over a prisoner to the Thalmor – however reluctantly – is troubling too. She can’t blame Thorald for being angry. She’s even half-tempted by his proposal, but it would only be another way of running from her fate.

She keeps her voice soft, deflecting. “I don’t think I’d make a good soldier.”

“It’s not like joining the Legion. Regulations and orders and lists—”

“My father fought with the Legion,” Freyja says, sharply.

Thorald softens. “Aye, and so did mine. So did half the old men in Whiterun, right up to the jarl himself. It was something to be proud of then, but it’s different now.”

“I’ve lived in Cyrodiil for years,” Freyja muses. “It’s been my home. There are fields, in the West Weald, where nothing will grow. Empty far as the eye can see. You’re walking through these golden ripples of grain high as your waist, and then you step over a rise and it’s nothing but cinders and earth. The elves did something to them, with magic. Like sowing salt.”

“And that justifies throwing the provinces to the wolves?”

“Of course not. Hammerfell’s worse, far worse – the Empire’s got a lot to answer for. But they didn’t make the decision lightly.”

“That doesn’t make it right.”

Freyja sighs, recalling the nameless dead man in Northwatch Keep. The brief catch of resistance before her dagger drove home, the scalding blood on her fingertips. “Sometimes right doesn’t have much to do with it.”

Thorald doesn’t reply to that. “At any rate, I can’t go back to Whiterun,” he murmurs, after a moment. “The Thalmor know I’m a Grey-Mane – it’s the first place they’ll look. It wouldn’t be safe for my family.” A deep crease forms between his brows. “Gods – they must think I’m dead.”

“Whiterun’s not so far out of the way on a trip to Windhelm,” Freyja says. “Nor to Ivarstead, for that matter. You could get a message in – I’ll take it myself, if you like. We can keep company till it comes time to cross the White.” Thorald gives her a grateful smile.

They retire early. The beds are simple, low and latticed, stuffed with straw and covered in furs; Freyja’s has a broken slat, but it feels soft as down after weeks of lying on the ground. And yet she cannot sleep. Long after the clamor from the tavern dies down she finds herself staring up at the ceiling, watching the light that drifts in from the firepit flicker amongst the rafters. She wonders if the dragon the hunters sighted is still in the mountains somewhere, feasting on goats it snatched from the edge of a crag. Or perhaps it did make its way to Mount Anthor; perhaps even now it hunches vulture-like over the peak, nearly invisible in the dark, slitted golden eyes glaring down at the battlefield where one of its ancient kin met his foe. Freyja wonders if dragons care for their own history, if they hate like men and hunger for revenge. Shivers. She can hear the innkeeper and his daughter arguing softly behind the bar. “She would want you to be happy, father,” murmurs the girl. “Entertaining the guests, and drinking, and making your lewd jokes like before.”

Her father is quieter; Freyja has to strain to make out his words. “…sorry,” she catches. “…Just don’t feel up to entertaining anyone.”

The bed-straw rustles as Freyja turns restlessly, pulling the furs more tightly around her shoulders. _He’s not the only one who’s ever lost someone,_ she said to Thorald earlier. She wonders how the innkeeper’s wife might have died.

“Do you want to talk?” asks the girl, a little more gently.

Freyja can’t hear the innkeeper’s answer, but it must be a refusal. The two do not speak any more. Only the dull clink of tankards and the scruff of a broom remain to lull her to sleep.

 

* * *

 

_"Nothing kills it!” screams a battlemage, frantically._

_Dimly, she is aware that she ought to be afraid. Just a moment ago she was, but now her temples throb with the pressure of a boiling, inexplicable rage: at the dragon, at the panicking mage, at the Legion’s bindings on her wrists and at the Stormcloaks who never thought to cut them. The dragon wheels overhead, gleaming like ebony granted life – and here she is helpless, earthbound, BOUND. A house near the center of town goes up in flames. Freyja screams in fury, and her throat feels empty._

_“Please tell me you’re not going to shout ‘Victory or Sovngarde,’” says a voice at her elbow, darkly amused._

_She turns. Indros looks back at her, warpaint vividly white against the charcoal of his skin._

_“You’re dead,” she tells him. He gives her a silent cipher of a smile._

_The smell of cooking flesh makes Freyja look around. A charred body crawls from a doorway, only to collapse in the dust of the street. “I built you a pyre,” she says to Indros, over her shoulder. She can’t seem to look away from the flames._

_“I know.” In his voice is the same fond exasperation she remembers. “Stop being a fool and run. You are outmatched, Dragonborn.”_

_She glances back at him, startled – and comes face-to-face with the dragon himself, red-eyed and glowing blue-black and cloaked in flame. His laugh rolls low and all-consuming as mountain thunder. Freyja grabs for her sword, and remembers her hands are bound._

She wakes with her dagger in hand, panting as though she’s been sprinting. Eitri is looking down at her, very calm and still. He meets her eyes over the cold blade kissing his throat.

Freyja releases him instantly, sits up gasping. “Divines, I’m sorry,” she says. “I was dr—”

“I know.” He steps away from her.

In her freshly-wakened state Freyja misses his proximity; there’s security in seeing a face she knows, feeling a warm body close. “Where are you—”

“Thorald,” he murmurs.

She looks up. Thorald is quaking on the floor, curled into himself, whimpering in an unrestrained animal way that chills Freyja’s blood. For a moment she stares, lungs clenching in her chest. Eitri steps past her without hesitation. As she shakes herself and swings her feet out onto the freezing floor Freyja sees the innkeep hovering near the doorway, looking hollow and unkempt. “What’s wrong with him?” he asks.

“Nightmare,” she mutters.

“Him, too?”

Freyja squints at him, sharply. “Have you had one as well?”

Thorald keens in his sleep, so loudly they both jump. “Not like that,” the innkeeper says. He looks unnerved.

Eitri kneels quickly, pulls Thorald into his arms like a child, and angry with him as she’s been Freyja is still struck by the gentleness and surety with which he does it. He would make a good healer. _Or a good father_ , she thinks, and then wonders where that thought came from. “Shh,” he murmurs, looking pained. Thorald shudders, choking terrified open vowel sounds against Eitri’s shirt.

In the end it doesn’t take long to quiet him; once he’s been prodded into wakefulness Thorald blinks at the tentative gazes turned his way, a dark flush creeping up his neck. He drops his head, rubbing at his temples. “Shor’s bones,” he mutters. Trying to give him some privacy, Freyja tugs the innkeeper aside and spends their last few coins buying trail rations for the journey. It won’t be enough – they’ll have to shoot the odd rabbit for dinner – but it’s better than nothing. When she returns Thorald is in a chair with his elbows braced on the little table. Eitri sits on the edge of the bed, looking worried but giving him space. Freyja starts to divide the rations between them.

“Is it morning yet?”

She looks up at Thorald’s hoarse question. Freyja nods. “Must be two hours or so till dawn. I’ve got the supplies – we can catch a bit more sleep before we set off, or—”

“Let’s go,” Thorald mutters, not quite looking at her. “Let’s just go.”

“We’re already awake,” Eitri concurs. Freyja shrugs her pack on wordlessly, rolling her shoulders under the added weight. Thorald slips past her with his head down. The fresh tight braids curtaining his face are all that remains of the rejuvenation of last night’s bath. For the first time, he looks defeated. Freyja sighs. What do you say to a man who’s escaped torment by the Thalmor, only to encounter it again from his own sleeping mind? She is good at solving problems with sword in hand, but Thorald’s ghosts cannot be slain with steel. And even if she were blessed with compassion by Mara herself, she isn’t sure he would welcome it. They leave in silence.

The inn’s wooden porch is dusted with spindrift, fine and light as sugar; it’s too early yet for foot traffic or the innkeeper’s broom to have swept it away. Their tread sounds crisply against the cold planks as they file down the steps, leaving clean-edged bootprints. The morning star for which the port long ago took its name winks above the sea.

They keep to the road this time, grateful for a beaten track no matter how obscured by blowing snow. In the distance the Pale’s thick taiga is a deeper black against the morning sky. But the hilly, barren coastal plains are drifted in rolling waves, flowing downhill toward the sea like a frozen mirror of the surf, and in places deceptively deep. At one point Thorald steps off the edge of the road and finds himself thigh-deep in powder. Eitri has to seize him by the wrist to haul him out. The open palm he extends is far from threatening, but Thorald still wrenches back before swallowing, hard, and taking the proffered hand. “ _Fuck_ ,” he grits out, as Eitri pulls him floundering from the snowdrift. “I’m sorry.”

“You should be,” Eitri says, lightly. “You’re carrying the mead.”

And just like that, Thorald’s blank, cornered expression melts into a tentative smile. “Oh, I see how it is,” he murmurs, with a light shove of the other man’s shoulder. When Eitri jostles him back he raises his palms. “Easy now – I’m carrying the mead.”

“Just wait.”

“Promises.” He flaps a mocking hand in Eitri’s direction. Freyja actually stops to watch under the pretext of fiddling with her shoulder straps, eyebrows climbing as the men stroll past trading comradely insults. She marvels at Eitri’s ease. With a joke and an open hand he’s banished the nightmare like so much morning mist. She thinks of the way he gathered Thorald in his arms back at the inn, not a hint of awkwardness or hesitation. He made it look as natural as breathing.

It’s odd to her, such gentleness in a man. But then for many years her experience of men has been mostly other mercenaries: aging rogues and one-eyed veterans, the lean, tough gristle of humanity. Not everyone keeps such company. And not everyone was fashioned to be a warrior. Eitri is gentle, but he isn’t soft. He can shrug off a grueling day’s march that leaves both Freyja and Thorald strung out like scraped hides; he fights with an earthy, dogged fierceness that makes up for a good deal of his inexperience. And he would have walked to his death with a clear-eyed courage that still astounds her, rather than leave his cousin to his inevitable fate. That’s more than she can say. When faced with a hopeless quest and an unwanted responsibility, Freyja dropped everything and ran.

She watches Thorald pelt a snowball at his head, and smiles faintly. A stubborn fool, maybe. But a kind one. At the moment she can barely find it in her to be angry with him.

By evening they’ve reached the deep forest cloaking the foothills of the mountains, and found shelter. It's not really a cave, just a grudging overhang of rock with a great drift of snow on the windward side and icicles clinging to the lip. But the ground is dry. And it blocks the wind, as the snowdrifts prove. They pitch the tent and build the fire, then eat what feels like a feast: chewy dried venison, slightly soft apples from the inn’s root cellar, and buttered potatoes baked directly in the coals, tasting faintly of ashes. Then they wash it down with the much-joked-about bottle of mead. It’s flavored with snowberries.

It is Freyja’s turn to take the first watch; she feeds the fire as night draws its cloak around them. Gazes into the darkness. The wind has been picking up all day, and now the huge black conifers creak with it. _We Nords were born of the wind,_ she remembers her father telling her on a childhood hunting trip, round a campfire very like this one, while an autumn blast hissed through Whiterun’s tundra grasses. _Kyne breathed upon the land to form the first men – thus we name the mountain Throat Of The World, and thus you have a measure of safety that the most hardened Imperial general does not, little one, even from the bitterest winter chill._ She remembers his wry smile, just visible in the dark. _Though it’s good to have a fire, no?_

The cold itself is a bright raw smell as she inhales, braided with spruce and woodsmoke and the promise of snow. Through a gap in the forest canopy Freyja watches clouds drift across the faint light of the stars. Skyrim, she thinks, for the thousandth time since crossing the border, is beautiful. She wishes she’d paid more attention to it as a girl. She wishes she could have shown it to Indros.

“Freyja.”  
  
Eitri’s voice is soft and unexpected behind her, and when she turns his face looks grim. It puts her on the defensive. Freyja sits up, shoulders pressed to the rock. She speaks more harshly than she means to. “What do you want?”  
  
"To apologize," says Eitri. Freyja just looks at him. He doesn't sit - remains on the other side of the fire, flexing his off hand in the way that's become a nervous habit.  
  
"You did right," he says. "But I couldn't stop thinking whether he might have a brother or a friend somewhere, wondering what happened to him."  
  
"I know."  
  
"It's just - they'll never know."  
  
"I know," she says again, feeling very tired.  
  
"I'm sorry."  
  
Freyja shrugs. "Me, too."  
  
Eitri is quiet for a moment. "I do know," he murmurs. "Thanks to you. Don't ever think I'm not grateful."  
  
She softens, a little. "I wish we'd found him alive."  
  
"Me, too," he echoes. Fidgets.  
  
Freyja nudges the cold ground beside her. "Sit down, then. If you're not going to sleep."  
  
He does. Frost-coated spruce branches tinkle against one another as the wind moves, sending a swirl of snow to hiss and sputter in the fire. Otherwise the night is very quiet. Not even a wolf howls. Both moons are hidden behind the clouds of an impending storm, and all the creatures of the forest are bedded down, awaiting the coming snow.

“I’m going with Thorald,” Eitri murmurs, after a long while. “To Windhelm.”

It doesn’t surprise her, not after all the talking the two men have done. But Freyja finds it strange to picture Eitri in the padded mail and mismatched blue wool of the Stormcloaks. They talked of his home so much that the idea of him anywhere else – without the wind in the golden leaves, the sun on the laughing river, the sweat on his brow from the heat of the forge – seems wrong. She feels a sudden pang. She’s going to miss him; even after the chilly silence of the past few weeks, she’s going to miss him. She wonders if he’ll survive the war. Wonders if she’ll ever know, if he doesn’t.

“It’s safer that way,” she assures herself, and then realizes that she’s spoken aloud. “If the Thalmor are still hunting you, you’ll never be safe in Ivarstead.”

“Aye,” he says. Gazes into the fire. “Brokkr meant to join, I think.”

It’s the first time she’s heard him say the name since Northwatch Keep. Suddenly Freyja aches for him. After losing Indros she buried herself in the forest to hunt and rage and weep herself insensible in solitude, but the three of them have been squeezed into such close proximity; Eitri’s only privacy has been during the lonely watches in the night. "It helps to talk, you know."

"I know," Eitri says, but he doesn't seem able to find anything more to say. The wind gusts again. The fire flickers.

"I had this friend," Freyja offers, suddenly. "Some scholar with more money than sense hired us both for an expedition to Morrowind because he thought he’d found the resting place of some relic. I--" she laughs ruefully. "I hated his guts at first, he was so unbearably _snide_. I wanted to take his head off. We fought better on the same side, though - right from the beginning we could move in battle like one person, like we'd been doing it all our lives. It was uncanny. After we got back to Cyrodiil I think we spent the next year shaking ash out of everything we owned, and we never quite got rid of each other, either. Worked together - five years, almost." It's a vast oversimplification, but she doesn’t feel up to telling him the full tale. Freyja swallows, the skin of her face and throat feeling stiff in the cold.

"What happened to him?" Eitri finally murmurs, when she does not continue.

"Bandits, if you can believe it. Only two of them. Stupid ones, too, to attack a couple of armored sellswords, but we were laughing over a joke he'd made and they caught us off guard. He just - missed his footing," she says, through numb lips. "I'd seen him fend off two and three men at a time, it should have been easy, but he stumbled at the wrong moment and this bandit's axe caught him in the throat. It was that fast. It didn't take me more than a moment to finish them off, and by the time I did he was already gone."

That was the part that had stayed with her at the time, gone round her head in dull, incredulous refrain - the suddenness. Even now she can see it happen: a shear of awkward motion, a gurgling yelp, and nothing. By the time she dropped to her knees his pupils were fixed and the dust of the battle was sticking to the glassy surface of his unblinking eyes. There were no last words, no tender touches or darkly-humored quips. Just a slip and a cry.

Eitri is looking at her with too much sudden understanding. "A friend," he repeats, slowly. “Is that why you don’t...?” Then he stops, his mind catching up with his mouth. Freyja looks away.

“He fought bravely,” Eitri finally says. _You’ll see him in Sovngarde_ , is what he means.

Freyja closes her eyes. “He was a Dunmer.” Eitri has no answer for that. “ _A Dunmer of House Hlaalu_ , he used to say, the proud bastard, nevermind Hlaalu hadn’t been a Great House since before he was born.” Her throat closes. Freyja watches the sparks from the fire rise into the night and whirl themselves out.

“Brokkr always loved a campfire,” says Eitri, after a long pause. A moment ago he started to raise his hand, as though to touch her shoulder, but now he shifts and lets it fall. “He loved sleeping outside. I think that’s why he took to hunting. I remember – we killed our ice wraiths together, up on the mountain, and he was insistent on lugging up not just bedrolls and a tent, but enough mead to put us both flat on our backs. So we could celebrate properly as men, or some such nonsense. I ended up carrying it, naturally.” He smiles a little. “The hunt went off without a hitch, but a frost troll came roaring into our camp while we were drinking. I thought we were dead. Nearly set fire to the tent trying to snatch up a branch from the fire, and Brokkr was lucky he had a pouch full of ice wraith teeth to prove himself an adult, the way his voice cracked when he shouted. And then the stupid beast slipped on a patch of ice and went sailing off the cliff. We stared after it for a few moments, and finally Brokkr just looked at me and said, ‘I won’t tell if you won’t.’”

Freyja barks a laugh.

“He told anyone who would listen that we tangled with a frost troll on our way back down the mountain, too, the rogue. The girls loved him.” Eitri’s voice trails off. “He was my brother, in everything but name.”

“He was my husband by any measure but a priest’s,” Freyja murmurs. She’s not sure where the confession comes from, but Eitri does not look surprised, only sad. He swallows, looking tactfully away. They both gaze into the snowy woods.

Neither of them speaks again that night. But Eitri sits the watch with her, nodding off with his back against the rock. Snow falls outside. And when his turn comes, Freyja never returns to the warmth of her bedroll either.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait. I am still not entirely happy with this chapter, but sometimes you just have to stop obsessing and post the darn thing.


	8. Pushing Back

The snows deepen as they climb into the mountains. Even keeping to the road, the three often find themselves struggling through drifts that have spilled across the track as though from a split sack of sugar. More than once they camp in the deep hole around the base of a massive spruce tree, heavily laden branches drooping to form a natural roof. They meet few travelers. This time of year, the most common signs of life beside their own are the neat prints of snow foxes threading between the trees.

The sprawling forest is far from empty, though. Rabbit stew becomes a common supper as they attempt to conserve their supplies. One day they stumble across a tribe of frostbite spiders, and the resultant fight leaves all three of them shivering and feverish, joints stiff from the foul creatures’ poison. They spend another tense evening listening to the hoots and growls of two male frost trolls arguing over territory. The land rises slowly, but steadily. When nights grow even colder and the enormous black spruces begin to grow smaller, gnarled and stunted by wind, Freyja knows that they are nearing the high point of their journey.

The old fort at Dunstad Pass is inhabited by bandits, who jeer at them from atop the walls; maybe they aren’t inclined to engage with a trio of armed and armored wanderers, or maybe the three of them just _look_ skint. Even so, one of the bandits sends an arrow hissing into the snow near Freyja’s feet. The warning is clear. She gestures obscenely in the archer’s direction, but takes the lead in climbing around, cursing Dawnstar’s jarl.

“What sort of fool lets a gang of cutthroats take up residence in the most strategic fort in his entire hold?” she growls, as they wade through ice and snow on the mountain slope.

Thorald shrugs. “None of the jarls have any guards to spare. When I left Whiterun the old White River Gang was getting bold, and the state of Valtheim Towers is a bloody disgrace. Right on the border with Eastmarch, and neither Ulfric nor Balgruuf wants to be the one to tie down a detachment holding the place. Or antagonize each other by posting men at the border, come to that. Balgruuf keeps paying out bounties, but every time some adventurer comes in and clears the fort another pack of lowlifes moves in.”

“Charming.” Freyja shakes her head.

“The sooner this war is over, the better,” Thorald agrees. Freyja grimaces. He’s right, but personally she can’t see the conflict being anything but long and ugly. And while she’ll likely fill her empty pockets carving up such grubby hideouts, that doesn’t mean more of them is good news. She’s well-schooled in the misery their denizens can cause.

Eitri’s thoughts seem to follow the same path. He’s watching her out of the corner of his eye, a worried little frown dogging his mouth. Freyja shakes her head. There was indeed a time when just the idea of bandits set her burning with impotent rage, when she’d have stormed any fort in her path with the sort of single-minded ferocity that didn’t care for odds; she still carries a long white scar along her ribs from one particularly messy encounter. But every fire blazes itself out eventually, even those of fury and grief. After a year it’s only a smoldering background ache, and it takes more than a simple mention of outlaws to set it flaring to life. To be fair, Eitri’s only just learned that it might be an issue, but his anxious concern is grating. And a bit worrying, quite frankly. The man is too damned _kind_ to fight in a war. “It was more than a year ago,” she tells him. By way of answer Eitri reaches over and squeezes her hand. He drops it quickly, but the gesture still leaves Freyja startled, and somewhat touched. Out of the corner of her eye she catches Thorald watching them with a tiny, satisfied smile. She’s a sudden sneaking suspicion that she’s not the only one he was urging to make peace.

“Was it strange?” Eitri murmurs, as they labor over a ridge of rock and corniced snow. The fort is grim but small below them, like a carven marker on a map. A frigid wind is dragging strands out of Freyja’s braids.

“Was what strange?”

“Having...” he twists his hands vaguely, awkward. “Being with someone – not human.”

Freyja shoves her windswept hair out of her eyes, wary. “How so?”

“Just – all the differences. Elves live so long, for one thing.”

Thorald looks curious. “You had an elven lover?”

“Yeah, that part was odd,” she says after a moment, leaving Thorald’s question to answer itself. She’s surprised by her own willingness to have this conversation, but somehow it feels natural. Perhaps because Eitri already knows part of the story; perhaps because she can recall the silent buckling of his face in Northwatch Keep. “He was young by elven standards, and yet he could remember the Great War. I’d barely been born, and he was in Cyrodiil, running supplies to the Legion.”

“He was a legionnaire?”

“No. After the Imperial City fell the army regrouped near Cheydinhal, and his family owned a general goods store there. He worked as a guard for the supply caravans. Dealt with the Legion a lot. I heard someone call it war profiteering once, actually, but he risked his life to smuggle supplies behind enemy lines. Talked his way past a Dominion patrol once by flirting with the commander, some utter flowery nonsense about Queen Morgiah of Firsthold and precedent for Altmer-Dunmer unions.” She shakes her head, remembering the way he could school his angular features into a cuttingly accurate depiction of Aldmeri snobbery, and then ruin the illusion by theatrically batting his eyelashes. “I can’t tell the story right.”

Eitri smiles. “He sounds like a rogue.”

“He grew up in the refugee quarter of Cheydinhal,” she says. “When Red Mountain erupted a lot of Dunmer fled there, especially the disenfranchised Hlaalu nobles. They had merchants’ ties to Cyrodiil, not that it did them much good in the end. Empire was too busy with its own problems. It’s not a bad place, but these days it’s...spare. Shabby. There’s not a lot of extras or kindness to go around. He was a survivor. Knew a bit about most everything, and how to turn it to profit. Youngest of three brothers and the only one not born in Morrowind, the one who worshipped the Divines alongside Azura.” Freyja shrugs. “He was good at that. Finding something he could use, in everything. Which rumors a tavern keeper would want to hear, which flowers would fetch a good price from the alchemist. And yes, he had a silver tongue, when he wasn’t sharpening it on everyone within reach. Which wasn’t often, frankly.”

“You loved him,” Eitri observes, quietly.

“Why shouldn’t I?” There’s a sudden snap in her voice, like a narrow branch whipping back across a path. Freyja is well aware of how some Nords feel about relations between men and elves.

“That’s not what I meant,” Eitri says, just as quietly. Freyja swallows. They don’t speak of it any more.

The slope of the land beyond the fort is a welcome change after the long, steady climb they’ve made since Dawnstar – although, with her heavy pack, Freyja soon feels the familiar downhill ache in her knees and the backs of her thighs. They make good time, but their hike around the pass ate at least an hour of daylight, and it’s bitterly cold. When the sun begins to settle low in the sky they are only too happy to turn off the path and stomp through the snow to the top of a little hill, where a downed spruce has created a small clearing. They pitch their tent in the natural windbreak formed by the big tree’s exposed roots, and then begin to gather firewood for a long, cold night.

The men spar as Freyja tends the fire, trying to force warmth into their limbs by crossing blades. Freyja frowns as she watches Eitri’s form. He’s improving, there’s no doubt about that. But she dearly hopes the Stormcloaks hand their recruits off to a weapons-master before sending them into the field. He’s not ready for organized battle. Freyja feels a surge of sudden fury at the idiots tearing Skyrim apart for their own blindness, at the Empire’s bloated bureaucracy and the Stormcloaks’ intransigent pride. Even at Thorald, for suggesting Eitri lend his arm to the cause – though gods know the man has his reasons. At the Thalmor most of all, for the way their machinations have rent her homeland along its seams. Good men shouldn’t die for nothing. But she can’t escape the foreboding that after all they’ve been through, the man she’s come to see as a friend will end as just another snow-dusted corpse in a muddied blue tabard.

They retreat to the tent as soon as they’ve eaten. Near midnight, Eitri shakes her awake to take the watch. Second watch is never pleasant – far better to rise early or stay up late than to interrupt a night’s rest – but tonight crawling out of the bedroll makes Freyja curse; the brutal cold rakes its claws over every sliver of exposed skin. The very air seems frozen. Night hangs suspended on the edge of the world, timeless and still, with only the slow revolution of the stars to mark the passage of the hours. Freyja wonders what High Hrothgar is like this late in the year. She’s chosen a poor time to develop a sense of duty. The Throat of the World is further south, but far higher; if it’s this frigid in the western end of the Anthors, the upper reaches of the mountain are sure to be colder than wraiths’ teeth, and buried in snow. She moves closer to the fire, tucking her fingers into her armpits and her nose in the fur of her cloak. At least the chill in the air makes it hard to doze. For long hours she sits staring into the darkness, wondering what the Greybeards will say when the Dragonborn arrives many months late.

There’s a soft crunch of snow. Freyja sits up, alert. The wind moves. Through a gap in the ice-stunted trees she sees the antlers of an elk silhouetted by the moons; when she moves the animal snorts a steaming breath and dashes away. Freyja settles back, relaxing her grip on the hilt of her sword.

A moment later, there’s another soft crunch. This time she slides the blade half out of its sheath, rising slowly to her feet. It may only be another night creature of the forest, but she would not put it past the bandits in the fort to follow their tracks, intending to raid while they are sleeping. Perhaps they even startled the elk from its bed. For a long time Freyja stands in the little clearing, listening. There’s nothing but the wind. Then between the trees, on the road below, she spots the gentle glow of magelight. “Find them,” someone mutters. Ominous-sounding, but it’s not the words that send a bolt of dread down Freyja’s spine.

It’s the smooth, clipped tones of someone raised on the Summerset Isles.

She kicks over the fire. Flies to the tent, fearing the smell of smoke, the hiss of the coals, the dry squeak of the snow beneath her boots. At her grip on their shoulders both men wake. “ _Thalmor_ ,” she whispers, and in the dark she hears Thorald’s harsh intake of breath.

Eitri rolls out from under his furs. “How did they find us?”

“Does it matter?”

“Go,” Thorald says, with tightly reined panic in his voice.

They sprint for the high ground, where Freyja pulls the men down behind a huge snowdrift. It’s no use running far. In this bitter cold they need their tent and bedrolls, and their food. The Thalmor won’t stop searching; better to fight them now, where they have the element of surprise, than take the chance of their enemy catching them unawares on the road. Hopefully they won’t even find the tent, but in her mind’s eye Freyja can see the neat set of tracks they left where they turned off the path. At least here, the clearing and surrounding woods are crisscrossed with their footprints, made as they gathered wood for the fire.

Sure enough, they soon hear slow, stealthy steps climbing the hill. A black-hooded form is the first to step into sight; Freyja sees him nudge the still-smoking remains of their fire with his toe. Four more shapes fan out behind him. Another wizard, and three warriors in glass armor. Under the magelight the elves’ long thin shadows stretch across the clearing, nearly far enough to touch the drifts where they hide. The first justiciar makes a sharp motion with his hands, and one of the soldiers throws open the flap of their tent. Freyja hears his soft curse, but the one in charge only swivels on his heel, very slowly, scanning the clearing.

“Come on out,” calls his cultured voice from beneath his hood, dry and amused. Freyja sees Eitri’s face twist in a snarl and grips his arm harshly – no use giving away their position. Thorald looks like he wants to throw up. The soft vibration of a spell drifts on the wind. Then it’s silent. And then it isn’t.

 _Detect Life_ , Freyja thinks, too late.

The fireball _whumps_ into the snowbank and punches sizzling out the other side, with a heat that’s enough to leave white streaks searing across Freyja’s vision. Another slams into the snow to their left. Freyja ducks, nearly flat on her face in the snow. She can hear the clink of glass armor as the soldiers fan out to flank them. Another fireball whizzes over their heads. They are caught like rats in a trap.

Thorald grabs her wrist, the panic on his face tempered with a feral courage. “Make them send you to Sovngarde,” he says. “Better than that hellhole they call a dungeon.”

“No one’s dying today,” Freyja hisses. He gives her a bitter smile.

Eitri catches something in that smile that she does not, because even in the dark Freyja sees alarm flare across his face; he makes a grab for the Grey-Mane, though it’s with his bad hand and the other man slips right through it. “Thorald--!”

And Thorald erupts over the top of the snowbank, roaring a challenge that makes even the frozen air quail: the Battle Cry, Kyne’s gift to her northern children, birthright of the first men.

The Thalmor break and run; Freyja springs upright with Eitri on her heels, screaming a more ordinary war cry of her own. Unwilling to squander their precious advantage, she gives chase to one of the fleeing soldiers, catching him at the treeline. He finds just enough courage to turn and parry her sword stroke before Freyja’s well-placed shield blow breaks his neck. When Eitri and Thorald sprint by her, though, she calls them back – “No! On me – stick together!”

They gather in a loose circle on the high ground, back to back, keeping the downed tree between themselves and the slope. “Get rid of the mages,” Freyja mutters rapidly. “Just close fast and hit’em hard – don’t let them stay at range, they’ll control the fight if you do. I’ll take one—”

She cuts off with a gasp as lightning rebounds from a stone, making her convulse before leaping to Eitri and Thorald. The Thalmor charge back up the hill, moonstone glinting under the starlight, and Freyja has just enough time to ready herself before they close. A mace smashes down with enough force to shudder through her like the lightning; if she were less skilled, or even less prepared, the blow would have broken her shield arm. She hears Thorald yell, sees a spray of flames from the corner of her eye, but the vicious onslaught commands her attention – Freyja backs away, dancing on the balls of her feet, trying to lead the mer into stepping past her with the momentum of his heavy weapon. It’s Eitri who drops him, axe cleaving his neck from behind before he’s forced to turn away and meet another of the soldiers. Freyja turns to go to Thorald’s aid – he’s facing all he can handle, a tall robed woman with a flame atronach and summoned blades – when a blaze of green light clips her elbow. It’s just the barest of glancing contacts over her armor, but her entire arm goes numb.

Freyja nearly drops her sword. She dives for cover, trying to spot the other wizard, gut clenching like a fist. Indros could cast paralysis, but not without draining his reserves of magicka nearly dry. Only a master mage casually tosses such spells in a battle. They’re facing at least one – and he wants to take them alive. Frantically, Freyja casts around until she sees him, hanging back near the treeline, readying a blast of fire in both hands. With her shield up, with a prayer that calls on Talos but is aimed at any gods who might be listening, Freyja charges.

When he sees her coming the wizard encircles himself with a spray of lightning that crackles along the ground as though the snow itself has burst into flame, casting the clearing in an eerie purple glow. Freyja leaps the obstacle – the lightning seems to rise and snap at her boots, like a nest of writhing snakes – and hacks at the mage’s legs, trying to throw him off balance. He’s wearing naught but robes, but her blade slides off as though his flesh is made of stone. She’s no choice but to set a brutal tempo, pressing him hard and fast enough that he cannot use the slower, more powerful weapons in his arsenal, absorbing the punishment of his shock spells with gritted teeth. The sparks jump along the length of her sword, and she thanks the gods that her armor isn’t steel.

In the end, it’s not a feat of clever swordplay that leaves her victorious – Freyja sees an opening and trips him, then drives her blade home when he sprawls on his back. The motion takes her to one knee, and for a moment she stays there, arms shaking, entire body tingling in pain. When she levers herself to her feet it’s just in time to see Thorald strike the killing blow on his own opponent, though his arm is bleeding and his cloak is aflame. Eitri is on the defensive, falling back before a flurry of blows from an elven soldier. Thorald is safe now but rolling in the snow, trying to struggle out of his cloak as he beats at the flames with his hands. Freyja vaults the extinguished campfire at a full sprint, screaming for Eitri to hold on. She sees him parry a stroke, duck a blast of fire, catch another blow in the curve of his axe. With a deft flick of the wrist the justiciar sends it spinning from his grasp. She’s not going to get there in time. Fear swells in her chest – and then cold rage. In latter days she will never be able to recall if she made a choice or if the word erupted from her throat of its own accord, but she remembers the way it rolled across the faces of the mountains.

“ ** _FUS!_** ”

Ten feet away, the justiciar staggers as though she’s punched him in the chest – and then Freyja is on him, a fury of cuts and slashes driving him back. The sheer power of her attack breaks every block he tries. Freyja catches uncomprehending fear in his gaze, and the snarl that crosses her lips does not sound entirely human. The elf throws up a hand, tries to slow the momentum of her charge with a cold blast of magic. In his panic he forgets to consider that she is a Nord. Freyja ploughs through the frantic spray of ice crystals, hamstrings him neatly, and then takes off his head with the backswing.

It falls silent, but for the magic still humming in the air and the sizzling of the snow around their feet.

Freyja gasps for breath. The little word inside her feels too big for her ribcage; she cannot believe she has carried it around all this time. Her lungs burn. She fills them with cold night air, and then turns to find Thorald staring at her, his cloak still smoking.

“You shouted at him,” he says, blankly. “You…Shouted, and he fell back. I saw it.”

Freyja shrugs weakly.

“There’s only two people who can Shout, aside from the Greybeards,” Thorald says. “And I’m pretty sure you’re not Ulfric Stormcloak. Why in Oblivion didn’t you tell us?”

Freyja swallows. It will take so long to explain; she doesn’t fully understand it herself. For a moment she searches for the words, then decides to remedy the problem by saying what she should have said from the beginning. “I’m…”

“Dragonborn,” Eitri breathes. He sounds rather faint.

“Yes.” Freyja swallows again. Tests the words. “I am Dragonborn.” Something deep in her chest roars approval. She puts a hand to her ribs, feeling breathless and exposed. Her heart is still pounding off-kilter with the aftershocks of the justiciar’s spells, and Eitri is staring at her. She looks away, afraid she’ll see hurt in her friend’s green gaze. Her eyes find Thorald’s instead.

“Do you have any idea what this means? Freyja,” he says, low and fervent. “Come to Windhelm with me.”

It’s tempting. So, so tempting. She does not want this responsibility, and yet with the dragon shout still rumbling in the air it seems absurd to have ever thought that she could hide from it. Freyja shakes her head. “I have something else to do.”

“Are you mad, woman? With the Dragonborn on our side, the war would be over in a year – less! What could be more important than that?”

“Dragons might.”

“You’ve seen what the Thalmor are capable of,” Thorald says, harshly. “We’ve all seen it. The Legion didn’t want to turn me over to them, but they did – they had to, if they wanted to keep to their cursed treaty. That’s not a treaty I want to live under. That’s not a treaty I want anyone else to live under. The Thalmor could imprison my whole family, they could imprison half the people I know and _torture them to death_ , and the Legion would have to let them do it!”

“I know,” Freyja says. “But there’s something I have to do.”

“Let someone else deal with the dragons for now. This is—”

“Who else?”

“For Talos’ sake—”

“She’s right,” Eitri says, quietly. “I agree with you, Thorald, you know I do, but not in this. There are a lot of warriors who can fight for the Stormcloaks, but there’s only one who can fight dragons.”

Freyja was not expecting help to come from that quarter. She looks up quickly, startled, and Eitri gives her a brief, encouraging little nod.

Thorald shakes his head in disbelief. “You of all people…”

“I know,” murmurs Eitri. His hand moves to cover the amulet hidden under his layers of clothing, pressed against his heart. “But I’ll stand by what I said. Dragons haven’t been seen in an age, and now they’re coming back. Someone needs to get to the bottom of it, and seems to me the Dragonborn’s the one to do it.”

Thorald throws up his hands in frustration, but he seems to recognize the sense in Eitri’s words; at any rate he does not push the issue further. Instead he kneels beside the cooling body of the mage that Freyja killed. A brief rummage of the inside pocket of his robes reveals a coin pouch and an official-looking parchment folded in thirds, broken seal still clinging to one edge. “What does it say?” Freyja asks immediately. Thorald stands, tilts the paper up toward the light of the moons, and reads aloud:

_HIGH PRIORITY - CAPTURE OR KILL_

_Be advised that two Nords – Eitri of Ivarstead, a low-priority prisoner with possible knowledge of a Talos cult, and Thorald Grey-Mane, a Stormcloak removed from Imperial custody as a potential asset (son of what passes for nobility in this barbaric province, the old and influential clan Grey-Mane of Whiterun) – have escaped our custody and must be eliminated or recaptured immediately. They are traveling in the company of another Nord, female, light-haired and heavily freckled, name and family unknown. After capture or elimination, acquiring information about this associate should be considered a priority._

_These fugitives have escaped a secure location and are actively responsible for the deaths of seven Thalmor officers. Failure is not an option._

_For the glory of the Aldmeri Dominion!_

Thorald looks up as he finishes reading. Takes a shaky breath. “‘High priority’ – is it wrong that I feel rather accomplished?” he asks, in a pale attempt at humor.

“Yes,” says Eitri, at once.

“No,” says Freyja, in unison. They both look at her. She lifts one shoulder in a little shrug. “We just killed a Thalmor death squad,” she says.

Suddenly all three of them are laughing, a little hysterically, laughing until Eitri has to lean against a tree and Freyja sits down hard in the snow and Thorald crouches on a rock with his head between his hands. His fingers grip hard in his hair as his chuckles start to trail off, faint and strained. Eitri puts a firm hand on his shoulder. “You’re never going back there,” he says.

“Damn right I’m not,” says Thorald, roughly. “They’ll have to kill me first.”

That sobers them all. “We should do something about the bodies,” Freyja murmurs, into the silence. “We don’t want a troll or a wolf pack sniffing them out.”

By the time they’ve rekindled the fire and dragged five corpses a sufficient distance into the trees, Secunda has set and Masser is only an immense somber sickle low in the sky. Eitri loans Thorald his undamaged cloak for the long dark of the early watches. The cold has crystallized, so clear and intense it seems the world could shatter at a touch, like steel shivered apart by a novice smith’s blow. Freyja can’t sleep for it. The sweat of their fight is drying on her skin, and every time she begins to drift off a little shiver grips her.

Or maybe it’s something else. She feels _awake_ , and not just in the literal sense. Freyja knows the heady exhilaration that follows battle, but this is different; something that was leashed is stretching its legs and purring deep in her chest. A part of her still wants to run from whatever awaits her in High Hrothgar. Another part remembers the way the elven soldier staggered back before her voice, and hungers for more. The conflicting impulses strain taut within her. She is immensely grateful that Eitri took her part. If both men had implored her to come to Windhelm, she’s not certain her resolve would have held. Freyja remembers the clean arc of his axe when the justiciar disarmed him, and shivers again. “Eitri,” she whispers.

He starts. "I thought you were asleep."

Freyja rolls over to look at him. For a moment she struggles, the words eluding her grasp in the dark. “Thank you,” she finally says.

A little furrow forms between his brows. “For what?”

Freyja swallows, feeling full and restless and mute. Too big for her skin. Shakes her head. The tent seems overwhelmingly small. She can feel the warmth of his body bleeding into the edge of her furs, and the cold like knives at her back. It’s harsh in her throat when she inhales.

Suddenly, fiercely, she leans up and presses her lips to the corner of his mouth.

It parts in surprise and she pulls herself halfway atop him, demanding, fingers clenching round his broad shoulders as she sucks his lower lip between her teeth. For a moment he’s boneless beneath her. Then he sits up, away, pushes her back. For a moment they stare at each other. “I thought you didn’t sleep with travelling companions,” Eitri says, but his voice is deep with arousal.

Freyja laughs at herself – a little raw, a little shaky. “That’s a load of mammoth dung,” she whispers. “I’ve never slept with anyone who wasn’t.”

He looks at her a long time, eyes deep and searching, shadowy pools in the darkness. Then he touches her cheek. Skims his knuckles over the long white scar that slants from eye socket to jawline. When he cups the back of her head and draws her forward it is to press her head against his chest and his lips to her hair. Then he shifts, gripping her arm, and fits his mouth over the pulse point at her neck.

It's so cold that his lips are chilly against her throat, and her own work over his skin a long time before losing their stiff, clumsy feel. She cups her hands over her mouth and breathes before she opens his armor, but even so she suspects it is the cold that makes his abdomen stiffen beneath her fingers, as much as her touch. When she shucks her own leggings Freyja gasps, the air striking bare skin like a slap.

At her strangled exhalation Eitri freezes. Then he lets out a frustrated little growl. “Thorald,” he says. “We shouldn’t—”

Freyja considers that for a moment. But she wants him. She wants him to live. She wants him with all the possessive greed of a dragon and all the need of a mortal woman. She wants to anchor herself in his steadiness, while fate stretches her in every direction like wool on history’s loom.  “I specialize in doing things I shouldn’t,” she says.

After a moment she sees the faint white crescent of his smile. When he puts his lips against her ear, the tip of his long nose is icy against her cheek. “Quietly,” he breathes.

And so they shift, slowly, hiding the flesh they’ve exposed with the covering furs, feeling their way in the dark. It’s strange to run her hands over leather rather than skin. She envies Eitri, who only has to unlace his breeches; Freyja is naked from ankles to waist. She huddles against him, shivering, pressing forehead to forehead until she feels him nudging at her thighs. Freyja hooks a leg over his knee, adjusts the bearskin. Their coming together is long, but deep. The surfaces of their armor rasp together.

If their coupling all those weeks ago was hard and desperate, this is slow – but consuming. A pulsing cadence, a building ache. Eitri rocks his hips in tiny, measured hitches that soon have her grinding her teeth against a flickering heat. It’s excruciating: like feeding tiny twigs into a fire that will not catch. Their humid panting turns to hoarfrost along the guard hairs of the bear pelt, each fiber bristling stark and white. When Freyja claws at his arm he only persists, steady. She cannot tell where cold ends and heat begins; it is all the same fierce burn, like the bite of a blade, like channels of molten glass bound tightly along her limbs.

His hand slips down to where their bodies join, and when the rough grain of his thumb brushes against her she jerks, breath catching high and desperate in her throat. Eitri grits his teeth. Drops his head like a man too spent to hold it up, cheek pressed hot against her own, forehead nuzzling into her hair. With his mouth above her ear he pants a stuttery little _sshh_ – and Freyja cannot tell if it is a reminder to her or to himself, but it makes her almost sob with need.

A flicker like moth's wings in the skin of his throat, a silent cry. His rhythm falters – and then Freyja is gone, with leather between her teeth and roaring in her ears.


	9. Boneyard

With the corpses of the hit squad lying frozen under the snow, their trail has gone well and truly cold. The Thalmor won’t stop searching. But it will be some time before they realize that their agents have disappeared, and nigh impossible for them to pick up the track once they do. In the unlikely event that wolves and ravens don’t scatter the bones and pick them clean, the bodies will lie hidden under the drifts till spring.

The knowledge that they are safe lifts a weight that Freyja didn’t know she was carrying; when she ducks out of the tent, every snow-shard gleams afresh. Even the air tastes clean. It calls the blood to her cheeks and stings her throat on the inhale, tart with pine and cold.

Eitri wriggles out behind her, broad shoulders making his exit far more awkward. Freyja admires them furtively. His hair is a torch against the snow and the slate-grey spruce, like candlelight glimpsed through honey mead; it’s longer from weeks on the run, just brushing his leather pauldrons, and she imagines weaving it into warrior’s braids while his head rests in her lap.

Thorald is stirring a pot of oats atop the fire, watching her. Sudden heat kindles under Freyja’s skin. There is no knowing in his gaze, nothing but mild curiosity, yet abruptly she cannot help but wonder just how discreet she and Eitri truly were. “Hungry?” he asks, and Freyja quickly takes a bowl and sits by the fire, where the heat of the glowing coals will hide her flush. Breakfast is bland, but warm. The spiky branches of a snowberry bush poke at her back, and Freyja scatters a handful of the fruits in her porridge. They are near-unbearably sour until they’ve seen successive hard freezes; only cold will awaken the delicate sweetness that makes them so favored for jams and baking. Hers are still rather tart, but Freyja savors them anyway. It’s been many years since she tasted snowberries fresh from the bush.

“Can’t be more than a day or two before we leave the mountains,” Eitri says beside her. “How far to Windhelm, from there?”

Thorald cocks his head, thinking. “It’s about six days march from Windhelm to the Nightgate Inn, and another few days from there to the crossroads near Giant’s Gap. If we wanted to we could be in the city inside of two weeks, but I plan to stop in at Whiterun. That will make it closer to three.”

“Maybe longer,” Eitri muses. “The snows will be here in three weeks, and not only in the mountains.”

The berries sour in her mouth. Freyja swallows, abruptly unable to stomach their acid taste. In the fresh light of morning and the warm aftermath of their lovemaking, it was easy to forget the possessive desperation that helped drive her to Eitri’s bed in the first place. No longer. She is bound for High Hrothgar, and he goes to pledge his axe to Ulfric’s cause. Freyja watches him balance the bowl of porridge on his knees, not quite trusting his off hand to hold it steady, and feels a sudden hollow certainty that he will not live out the spring. Her throat floods with angry pressure. Something in her snarls that if she only knew the proper words she could shape it all to her will, shout fickle fate into submission, but she doubts that even dragons can do that.

“Where exactly are you headed, Freyja?” Thorald asks, breaking into her thoughts.

“High Hrothgar,” she mutters. “I’ve put off the Greybeards’ summons for too long.”

Eitri raises his eyebrows at that. For a moment she thinks he’s going to question her about what she’s been doing with herself all this time, but he only shakes his head. “By Ysmir. You’re going to climb the Throat of the World in the winter?”

“I don’t see that I have a choice.”

“You’ll freeze to death, if the ice wraiths and the trolls don’t get you first.”

“Wraiths I can handle, and trolls too. It’s keeping to the path that worries me. It’ll be covered in snow by now, and that’s a long way to fall.”

“You could get Klimmek to guide you,” Eitri ponders aloud, frowning. “He’s made that climb hundreds of times. But he doesn’t make many trips once winter comes.”

Freyja shrugs. “Well, I’m worried about getting eaten by a dragon, too, but I’ll take each day as it comes.”

Thorald guffaws, rising to wander off in search of a convenient tree. Freyja finishes her porridge and sets it aside, staring into the flames. Joking aside, the logistics of a climb to High Hrothgar this time of the year are daunting. When Eitri takes her hand, she starts. Freyja nearly pulls away; he will do nothing but keep his word by going to Windhelm, and yet the idea makes her feel a foolish girl waking to a cold bed, to the betrayal of a promise written in flesh but never spoken aloud. As it turns out, though, he is only inspecting an abrasion across the backs of her knuckles. “Did you get this last night?”

“Probably,” Freyja says.

“I don’t think I thanked you, for killing that last justiciar.”

Her gut churns with the remembrance. “I thought he had you.”

“He did,” Eitri says, with that ease of self-assessment that she finds so admirable; many men she knows would be defensive, pride wounded by the close call. “When he disarmed me I was certain I was dead, and then you Shouted. I’ve never seen anything like it.” He gives her a sidelong look, earnest. “I’ve never seen anything like you.”

Freyja is a seasoned warrior who has traveled more of Tamriel than her two companions combined and probably killed more men as well, and she absolutely does not blush. “Are you trying to get into my armor again, already?”

“Yes.”

She barks an awkward little laugh at that. She can’t help herself; he’s usually so mild-mannered that this brazen, almost cocksure side unbalances her. As for Freyja, she’s better with actions than words, and always has been. Put a sword in her grip or the body of one she cares for under her hands, and she can make herself understood clearly enough. But this sort of morning-after small talk has never come easily.

“You do that, you know,” he says, more gently. “Give me everything all at once, and then strap the armor back on. It’s a bit maddening.”

“Are we still talking about sex?” Freyja asks, dryly.

He smiles. “You’ve saved my life how many times now, and I don’t know anything about you.”

She frowns. “You know a lot about me.”

“I know you’re a sellsword from Whiterun, that you’ve traveled, that you loved a man – mer, I guess – who died. As of last night, I know you’re Dragonborn. That’s all.”

Freyja’s voice is a bit strangled. “That’s a lot to know about anyone.”

“Not really. I don’t know what you think about most of it, or how you feel.”

She regards him warily. “What do you want to know, then?”

“What’s your favorite color?”

Freyja laughs again, the tension broken. “All my important secrets, I see.” Eitri shrugs. “It’s blue.”

“Why?”

“I need a reason, now?”

“Everyone has a reason for their favorite color.”

Freyja throws up her hands. “Divines, I don’t know. It’s always been blue. My mother had a blue wool dress – light blue, like the sky in springtime. She looked beautiful in it. I was always running about in breeches, but I used to think that if I had a dress like that I might not mind so much.”

“There’s a reason.”

“That’s not why blue is my favorite color,” she insists, but Eitri just smiles faintly. “Do you still have family in Whiterun?” he asks.

“No,” she says, “not anymore. My mother and father died while I was in Cyrodiil.”

Eitri looks pained. “I’m sorry.”

“Thanks,” Freyja murmurs. If there’s one thing she regrets of her chosen profession, it’s that. Her parents were well into their seventies, but their deaths were sudden – a bad outbreak of rockjoint one winter – and their only daughter thousands of miles from their bedsides. By the time she got the letter, they were already dead. “They lived long, happy lives, which I guess is all I can ask.”

“They must have been older when they had you,” Eitri muses.

“They didn’t think the gods would give them children,” says Freyja. “Lost two in the womb and had another stillborn son, before I came along.” Her smile is rueful. “I think I was a bit spoiled, especially by my father. He didn’t meet me until after the war was over.”

Eitri shakes his head. “The gods had a hand in your birth, that’s clear.”

Freyja blinks and then laughs, uncomfortably. “You say that like it’s nothing.”

“You’re Dragonborn.”

“And that, too.”

“Why shouldn’t I? It’s what you are.”

Freyja shrugs, not quite finding the words to convey her unease. Eitri shoots her a curious look, but he does not press the issue. “I won’t rest easy until I know you can make it up the mountain,” he says instead. “The debt I owe you—”

“You don’t owe me anything.”

Eitri outright scoffs. “You handed over your entire purse to some copper-septim smuggler to get us to Dawnstar, and that was after you saved my life, bought me armor, and then broke into a Thalmor dungeon as a _favor_. Has no one ever told you that you’re absurdly generous?”

“I’m really not,” she says. “There’s a reason they call the opposite impulse _mercenary_. And I handed over all my gold because I didn’t want to see the inside of Northwatch Keep from Thorald’s perspective, which makes me sane, not generous.”

He doesn’t bother arguing with that logic. “Are you truly worried about climbing the mountain?”

“I’ll manage.”

“Freyja – I’m not asking if you need a guide. I’m asking if you want one.”

His tone makes her glance up. Eitri meets her gaze squarely, earnestness written all over his face. He flushes slightly under her scrutiny. “I thought you were going with Thorald,” says Freyja, slowly.

It’s his turn to hesitate, looking troubled, and then to cover that hesitation with a joke. Eitri flashes her a charming smile, sly and sheepish all at once. “You’re prettier than he is.”

This time she does blush. Thorald chooses that moment to saunter back into camp, with a gleam in his eye that makes it shamelessly evident he’s been listening. He takes one look at her face and starts smirking broadly, and Freyja sweeps a leg beneath his ankle and drops him face-first into a drift. “Finally,” Thorald drawls, voice muffled by the snow.

“I’d like a guide,” Freyja says.

Thorald rolls over, beard and brows thick with white flakes. “And here I thought I was the beauty of this trio.”

 

* * *

 

As Eitri predicted, they soon leave the Anthors behind them, trading the switchbacks of the mountain road for a more gently sloping track. When it grows broader and better maintained, it also grows less deserted. A farmer named Loreius even offers them a ride in the bed of his wagon, glad for the protection of three armed travelers; he’s returning from a late-season trading run to Dawnstar, where the thin soil and harsh weather guarantee a good price for his vegetables, and apparently had a narrow escape with the bandits in Dunstad Pass. Thorald asks eagerly after any news from Whiterun, but Freyja sits silently amongst the mended tools and baskets of smoked fish, watching the countryside roll by. She knows this land. On his longest hunting trips her father sometimes ranged as far as Giant’s Gap, and once or twice she camped with him nearby. When she was seventeen she killed her ice wraith at the Weynon Stones and left its teeth as an offering at the shrine to Talos. Not far from the shrine the road curves east, slipping away to tryst with the slender Yorgrim valley; but near due south, yet hidden beyond the jumbled swells of the Heljarchen Hills, lies the windswept heath of Whiterun hold. Already she spies familiar landmarks. To the southeast Freyja can see the sharkstooth crown of Shearpoint. If they keep that mountain to their left they will strike the White River – and then the city to which the river has given its name.

Loreius’ farm turns out to be a small homestead atop a hill, with winter wheat planted in one field and chickens pecking amongst the fallow rows of another. Like a day laborer the sun is starting its homeward trudge, and the farmer invites them in. They’ve barely crossed the threshold when Thorald freezes. Seeing that her husband brought guests, Lorieus’ wife has laid the table with bread, meat and mead according to Nordic custom. But the woman isn’t a Nord. She’s not even an Imperial, like her husband. Though she wears the simple dress and work-roughened hands of every other homestead farmer’s wife in Skyrim, she has the golden skin and slanted eyes of an Altmer.

The farmer narrows his eyes. “Is there a problem?”

“No,” Eitri says, laying a hand on Thorald’s shoulder when the other man’s throat works without forming any words. “There’s no problem.”

“Won’t you stay?” asks the wife, but she looks uncertain.

“We can’t impose,” Eitri says. “Kynareth’s blessing on you for your hospitality, truly. But you’ve just gotten your husband back from a long journey, and we’ve still many miles to travel.” With that he steps firmly back through the door with Thorald in tow. Freyja, fairly certain she can’t improve on his courtesy, simply nods her thanks and follow them out.

They’ve barely made it down the hill before Thorald sits down hard and puts his head between his knees. Freyja can hear the air whistling through his teeth. “Breathe,” she advises; she’s seen this sort of reaction before, in war veterans and kidnap victims. Eitri offers a hand, and Thorald grips it so hard that the former smith actually winces.

Finally Thorald surfaces, white-faced and sweaty. “Sorry,” he manages.

“Not all Altmer are Thalmor,” Freyja reminds him, quietly.

“I _know_.” His tone is startlingly vicious, but the anger evaporates as quickly as it appears, leaving only exhaustion. “Just took me off guard.” Freyja wonders if the woman’s appearance was truly enough to panic him so, or if this is a delayed response to the other night’s attack – or to the orders their attackers carried. If the Thalmor knew her by name and wanted her dead gods know she’d be nervous, and her reasons to fear them don’t go nearly as deep as Thorald’s.

Weary in several senses, they slog halfway up the next rise before letting their packs fall amongst the rocks in an old mammoth boneyard. An odd place to camp, but a natural spring – the same that attracted the dying mammoths, no doubt – wells up from the ground there, and a few winterkilled trees nearby make for excellent firewood. Still, it’s an eerie spot to sleep. Great granite boulders ring them in like faceless sentinels. Elk bugle in the nearby forest while moonlight glints off the old ivory. The three of them huddle together round the fire, not yet willing to go to their bedrolls.

Freyja hums to herself, trying to chart the final leg of their journey to Whiterun. If she remembers aright the road meanders here, trickling aimlessly from one tiny hamlet to another. It’s faster to cut across country. And Thorald is determined not to enter the city, nor to come within a mile of Battle-Born farm. “Safer that way,” he says, clearly still on edge. “There’s clan-feud between our families.”

“They wouldn’t give you to the Thalmor, surely.” Together with Thorald’s sister, the younger Battle-Born son Jon was one of Freyja’s close playmates, growing up.

“No, but they’d hand me over to the Legion.” His tone is bitter. “Which, apparently, amounts to the same thing. They know I joined up with the Stormcloaks – half of bloody Whiterun knows, going by Avulstein and Idolaf’s shouting when we left for Windhelm, and those that didn’t witness the third eruption of Red Mountain heard tell of it later, I’m sure. No – there’s a hidden pass in the mountains just east of the river, and I’ll wait for word there. You can bring it yourself, if all else fails. That’s the fastest road to Ivarstead from Whiterun.”

Freyja blinks, surprised. “I didn’t know there was a road to Ivarstead this side of Riverwood. Not before crossing into Eastmarch.”

“It’s not a road. Just a game trail, really. You can’t even lead a horse over – maybe a pony or a mule.”

The snow piling up on the slopes of the Throat of the World is a looming shadow at the back of Freyja’s mind. “By the Nine, that’ll save us time!” she bursts out. “How’d you find it?”

Thorald hesitates. “You can’t repeat this,” he murmurs. “You’ll start a war.”

She nearly laughs – there’s scarcely room for another war in Skyrim at present – but one look at Thorald’s face shows that he isn’t joking. “What is it?”

He hesitates again. “There’s a Stormcloak camp there,” he finally admits. “That’s where I’ll be waiting.”

Freyja feels her eyebrows leap towards her hairline. “Ulfric’s got men on this side of the Whiterun border?” she asks, incredulous. “Balgruuf would be _livid_!”

“It’s just a scouting force,” Thorald says, quickly. “Not nearly large enough to be a threat. They keep an eye on the road.”

“That’s a damned big risk to take if he wants to win the jarl’s support.”

“You see my point,” Thorald says. “But there’s a ford near the big bend in the White, just before the gorge. I’ll cross there and make for that pass.” Freyja purses her lips, watching the fire. She’ll have to get him to mark it on her map.

“I know that one,” Eitri says.

“Everyone knows that one,” says Thorald.

“Sorry – what?”

Thorald smiles, looking a little less shaken. “You hum when you’re thinking.”

“We’ve been counting the tunes that we know,” Eitri laughs, though he smiles at her to soften the teasing.

Freyja lifts an eyebrow, amused. “What was I singing, then?”

“That old drinking round about the seasons – _Sell-Sword Song_.”

Freyja nods. She knows it well; it’s a song for nomads, full of restless longing, and every tavern in Tamriel deals in that sort of coin. “Go on, then,” Thorald says, eyes glinting with mischief.

Freyja snorts. “You’re the ones trying to prove that you know it.”

“That means you, brother,” he says, this time to Eitri. The other man rolls his eyes a little, looking self-conscious, but he starts the round just the same.

_I once loved a woman as fair as an evening_

_Of springtime in old Stros M’Kai;_

_But I lost her, in thrall_

_To the road’s siren call_

_Now I’ll wander this land till I die_

Self-conscious he may be, and without the voice to make a bard, but when Eitri starts to sing about fair evenings he weaves cold fingers into hers. Freyja thinks she sees a little smile tug at Thorald’s mouth. He doesn’t comment, though, just lends his voice to the first verse while Eitri starts the second:

_I once tasted honey mead bright as the summer_

_In fields of Colovian grain;_

_Comrades laughed until dawn_

_Now their voices are gone_

_Till in Shor’s Hall we drink mead again_

_I once fought a sword-dance as wild as the ash-storms_

_In the autumn of Red Mountain’s fall;_

_I could tell you the stories_

_Of a thousand such glories_

_But I do not remember them all_

_I once was a young man, as steadfast as winter_

_In the northlands that I called my home;_

_I once was a bold man_

_But now I’m an old man_

_With nothing more left but to roam._

As the last to join, it’s Freyja left to sing the final verse on her own. Her voice wavers a bit, unaccustomed to singing for an audience; it sounds thin to her ears, after hearing it alongside the others. The last syllable is a puff of frost in the firelight. A breeze blows it swiftly away, and Freyja twines her fingers more firmly with Eitri’s, suddenly glad for the company of her two companions. Eitri is looking at Thorald, whose face has gone pensive. “Are you all right?” he murmurs, with a little jerk of his head back towards the Loreius farm.

Thorald shakes off his solemn expression. “Aye, I’ll be fine.”

Eitri studies him, and Freyja studies Eitri. Thorald is the man he pulled out of Northwatch Keep in his cousin’s stead, to whom he paid all the care and attention that he would have shown to Brokkr, had he lived. And Eitri is kin of the man to whom Thorald feels he owes an unpaid debt, who he is haunted by his helplessness to save. A sad sort of bond, forged in duty and guilt and grief, but the result isn’t sad. Theirs is a camaraderie even beyond that of men who’ve spent weeks sharing a tent in the wilds; they banter and laugh and make mischief like old shield-brothers, carry on wordless conversations like comrades who’ve had years to learn each other’s body language.

Under Eitri’s scrutiny Thorald shifts, gestures at himself with a jerk of his hand. “I just – I’m not in fighting shape,” he mutters. “I’m afraid the Stormcloaks won’t – want me back, and if I can’t fight...” His voice trails off.

Privately, Freyja thinks he’s borrowing trouble. Half the Stormcloaks she’s encountered have been stripling farmhands more concerned with where their next meal is coming from than with the proper grips of a blade; though he’s managed to battle the IVth Legion to a surprising deadlock, Ulfric is not nearly so secure that he can afford to turn away warm bodies. “You fought well the other night,” she says.

His face twists. “But you saw me today. I still – I thought it would stop. I thought—” he checks himself, looks at Eitri. “You don’t need to hear this.”

“Maybe I do.” Thorald shakes his head. “I know how my cousin died, Thorald,” Eitri murmurs. “I was there. I saw what they were doing to people.”

“That doesn’t mean you need to hear about it. Trust me. It’s not something you want haunting your dreams.”

“It already does,” says Eitri. Thorald just shakes his head again. After an uncomfortable silence Freyja whistles the opening line to _Ragnar the Red_ ; the men chuckle and fall back to singing, but all three of them sleep restlessly that night. Freyja cannot help but wonder if Eitri will truly let Thorald go on to Windhelm alone, when the time comes. She can’t say that she would blame him either way.

Even in the next morning’s light the boneyard is a pale and lonely place. Damp gathers in the spring-fed hollow, and they shiver as they break camp. Freyja is glad to stride up the crest of the hill, where the sun turns the frosted grass-blades to golden daggers. Then she stops. Beside her, she hears Thorald’s breath catch.

The wide familiar plains of Whiterun sprawl before them, unmistakable in the dusty purple and russet hues of her autumn cloak. The White River is a quicksilver streak in the distance, and Dragonsreach on its lone high tor stands proud and defiant as a warrior blowing a horn-call. The Throat of the World soars blue above the morning mist. A flurry of rising air carries the clean, earthy smell of tundra cotton.

Maybe it’s only the wind tearing unhindered across the steppe, but abruptly Thorald lifts the heel of his hand and dashes moisture from his eyes. Freyja looks away. She doesn’t blame him, though. The man spent three months believing he would never see the sky again, let alone the hold of his birth. And he must know that he cannot stay. The first place the Thalmor will look is Whiterun, and Jarl Balgruuf, committed to his neutrality, cannot shield him. Freyja stands beside him, looking down at their mutual homeland. The killing cold of the mountains has abated, but it’s clear that the year is dying. Snow dusts the ground in shadowed hollows. An elk noses among the windswept heather, velvet hanging in bloody shreds from his heavy crown.

But even the chill of late autumn can’t dampen the pleasure of treading well-known ground, as though the earth itself is now an ally in their personal quests. They make good time, so good that the thought of parting ways with Thorald at the White River inspires an occasional pang of melancholy. After the close, dark forests and snow-covered mountains of the Pale the landscape seems vast and open. Yet appearances are deceptive. The tundra is full of small hollows and rock-strewn rises, and being at the bottom of one of the former is like finding oneself in the trough between ocean swells. The dull roar of the wind, likewise, is isolating; even at short distances the three of them sometimes have to shout to be heard. The plains may seem difficult to hide in, but after years of hunting with her father Freyja knows that Whiterun is both a surprisingly good place for an ambush and a surprisingly easy one in which to get lost.

Usually the rolling hills conceal nothing more dangerous than hares or deer. But on their final afternoon of travel towards the river, they come across something none of them has seen before: a huge circle of freshly scarred earth, like the nest of some great beast or the blast of a monstrous fireball. “What in Oblivion?” Thorald murmurs.

Eitri steps down into the pit; it’s nearly waist-deep, and he is not a small man. He scuffs at the rich black loam with his boot. “Something the giants made?” he guesses.

The back of Freyja’s neck is prickling, though she can’t say why. “Come on,” she says. “Giants don’t like their sacred space invaded, if that’s what this is.” She has her doubts. There are several upright stones nearby, listing at haphazard angles in the tundra grass, but they bear none of the symbols that giants usually use. And they are old. She runs her hand over one, as they move on, and weathered lichen crumbles beneath her palm.

The surprise is in how quickly it happens. One minute they are laboring up a rise; the next the earth trembles, and a bellowing red-brown bulk breaks over the crest of the hill like a wave. They scatter. The mammoth does not even slow. Freyja stares after the massive animal, at the crushed bracken and trampled earth in its wake. It’s rare to see a mammoth run from anything. Sometimes sabrecats or the occasional bold wolfpack will prey on the young, but even that is unusual – and it’s not the season for mammoth calving, anyway. One hand curves around her sword hilt.

“Poachers, maybe,” says Thorald, who is evidently thinking along the same lines. “A man’s got to be foolish or desperate to draw the giants’ wrath, but I’ve seen it happen.” The ground shudders again. Freyja bounds to the top of the slope, intent on having advance warning of any more stampeding mammoths.

And stops, like a blade meeting a well-timed block.

White River Gorge lies below them, a steep-sided scar where the tundra meets Shearpoint’s unlovely bulk and the river scours the mountain down to its roots, like a huge tree growing beside an undercut bank. Rising spume marks the rapids still hidden by the gorge’s walls. Whiterun is scarcely three miles distant. She can faintly make out a few of the small farms that cling to the city’s apron, blue smoke rising from their hearths, but that is not what draws her eye. Between them and the gorge, close enough it seems to touch, a giant is doing battle with a dragon.

She sees the great scaled body flash in the sun, gleaming like fish’s mail, like slick hard ice over black rock. The spikes bristling along its spine appear smoother and sharper than those of the dragons she remembers from Helgen or the western watchtower. _I am cataloguing dragons now_ , Freyja thinks, a little wildly. _Perhaps there are multiple species. Perhaps I can write a field guide._ To her morbid amusement, it promptly unhinges its maw and howls a cutting blizzard of ice at its foe, appearing to prove her correct. Or perhaps dragons are like mages, and favor one school of destruction over another. Perhaps this one simply prefers its food uncooked.

Beside her Thorald is swearing in a colorful unbroken stream, seemingly caught between reluctant awe and terror; Eitri looks like a man in need of a very strong drink or three. Freyja, for her part, just feels rather sick. She has slain men and monsters in four provinces, held the high ground – or gained it – against superior numbers, stood eye to eye with vampires and necromancers and now even a Thalmor hit squad, and never flinched. But this creature is the size of a village inn. And everyone in Skyrim, from the Greybeards to the bickering Dawnstar tavern-goers, expects her to know how to kill it. Fast as lightning, horrifically slow as a precious vase tipped from a table, she watches the dragon snap its teeth closed on one of the giant’s sinewy knees. There’s a wet crack, a heart-stopping howl, and then a gruesome display of the power in its jaws. The giant does not remain in agony very long.

She starts to back away, then. Whiterun is close, the surrounding farms even closer; though the giant’s club looks to have mangled one wing beyond the power of flight, the jarl’s men still need to know of the threat. But then – maybe with a predator’s unerring eye for rapid motion, maybe by pure coincidence – the dragon turns its head, gore dripping from its jaws, and spots them. Its Shout is a thunderclap given substance. From fifty feet away it sweeps them off their feet like pieces in a _tafl_ game. Freyja lands hard enough to rattle her eyes in their sockets – and when she leaps to her feet, retreat is no longer an option.

It’s the same Shout she used on the Thalmor justiciar; she can’t say how she knows, as it was far more powerful than anything she could dream of accomplishing, but that thought goads rather than frightens her. She has met foes before who believed that size and strength gave them the right to kill and destroy and take what they pleased. She’ll meet them again. In this moment she feels only raging indignation at being challenged – and determination to answer it, if it means wresting the knowledge of how to Shout so mightily out of her enemy’s scaly, still-warm corpse. Her sword is out of its sheath before Eitri and Thorald have even picked themselves up off the ground.

“ _Freyja!_ ” shouts one of the men – she’s not sure which – she doesn’t care. There’s no cover here, and her only thought is to close with the dragon before it has another chance to Shout her off her feet. The creature sways its head as she approaches, an unmistakably serpentine motion; Freyja can’t say whether it’s her scant experience with its kin or with the desert vipers of the Alik’r, but she dodges with the precision of well-honed instinct, a dancing back-foot pivot that swings her smoothly aside when it strikes, terrifyingly fast. Freyja puts all the momentum of her charge into a slash at the long neck uncoiling past her, and her sword rings as though meeting mail.

The dragon roars, more in fury than pain, and she darts back along its body, using its own bulk as cover. Up close its sheer size is as much a drawback as an advantage. In some ways it’s no different than fighting a man with a greatsword, pressing inside the weapon’s reach where it cannot be swung to full effect. Freyja ducks beneath a tattered wing, searching for some sort of weak point in the belly, and her nose floods with a dark reptilian scent, heavy as the incense in a coven of daedra worshipers that she was once hired to destroy after they murdered one too many travelers.

She’s not sure why that memory surfaces now, but the split second of distraction costs her as the leading edge of the wing clouts her across the side. The gesture is more irritable than vicious, like the motion she would use to swat a fly. But the wing is hard there, heavy with bone, and the impact feels like a giant’s club. Before she can even make sense of what’s happened Freyja is skidding along the tundra like a stone skipped across a pond, crashing to a halt alarmingly close to the steep river bluffs. Her shield is gone. Ripped from her hand, and she staggers into a defensive crouch with her sword before her, ribcage searing on every inhale. The dragon’s malevolent yellow gaze locks with her own. It is already charging, claws gouging cruel furrows in the earth, and Freyja catches a burning breath at the _intent_ she sees there, something older and far more intelligent than animal instinct. Her gut swoops. She lives or dies in this moment.

And then it’s upon her, and the reflex of a thousand battles commands her limbs. Freyja moves into the strike, feinting high, and when it rears back she darts beneath its chin; the long neck coils as it tries to track her movements, and when the dragon’s head dips she springs. One hand closes around a wicked spike in the row along its spine. Freyja swings herself up as though into a saddle, hooking her ankles beneath the creature’s throat, locking her knees around the muscled neck, and brings her sword whistling down to hack gracelessly at its eyes. The dragon screams. There’s no other word for it: a piercing shriek like that of a mountain eagle, mingled rage and pain and terror given voice as it jerks and writhes so viciously that it nearly bucks her off. Freyja gets a desperate two-handed grip on her sword, drives it point-first toward the joint where its neck meets the back of its skull, and finally the blade sinks home – raggedly, and then deeper as she throws her body forward a second time. The dragon convulses and then slumps to earth, with a ground-shaking finality that sends great puffs of tundra cotton to swirl in the breeze.

Before she’s even had the chance to feel shock or elation something lurches in her belly. The same sensation that she remembers from all those months ago, both terrible and exhilarating: like the heady rush of strong mead and the next morning’s throbbing agony all at once. She is falling, flying, fading, hot with triumph and cold with fury; Freyja clutches at the slick scales of the dragon’s neck even they melt beneath her, vision gone dark and bright. Her head roars. When it finally subsides she gasps in relief. Eitri and Thorald are calling her name. Freyja shifts, dizzily moving to stand.

And then she is falling in truth, as the loose rock and earth of the bank shears beneath the dragon’s weight and slides – tumbles – plummets to the river below.


	10. The Wheel Turns

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> With thanks to Morninglight (see Author's Note).

Freezing water laps at her neck. Disoriented, aching from top to toe, Freyja groans. Gasps for breath. Her ribs creak. When she rolls her neck she gets a mouthful of the White River and sputters, struggling to sit up. Above her the sky is a sullen white; she is prone in the mud-and-gravel shallows, head pounding, moisture seeping through her armor. The dragon’s skeleton surrounds her, still intact but for a few bones scattered like the beads of a broken necklace.

Pain lances through her foot. For a moment she fears that she has crushed it beneath a boulder or – worse yet – a dragon bone. Then she realizes that a territorial mudcrab has latched onto her boot. Freyja lands a vicious kick directly between its eyes, flat on her back but still forceful enough to send it soaring into the river. The scavenger bounces off a rock and sinks into the current, flailing. Freyja looks around.

Another mudcrab scuttles toward her, pincers raised in aggressive display. It strikes her as utterly absurd that she should feel fear _now_ of all times, beside the bones of a dragon dead at her hands. But this one, unlike its fellow, is fully grown, and the claws of a mature mudcrab have been known to dent plate. When she was a girl Freyja made a game of bouncing pebbles off the creatures’ shells, poking them with long branches to watch them snap the wood cleanly in half. Some of the sticks were as thick as her wrist. Freyja gropes for her sword, but of course it is gone: dropped somewhere in her wild slide down into the gorge, and her shield flung aside on the tundra above. Grimly she scoots backward, fumbling for her dagger.

With truly impeccable timing Eitri comes skidding down the gravel bank and buries his axe in the mudcrab’s shell, so that it hisses faintly and dies, twitching. As he plants a boot on its back and gives the blade a ferocious yank Thorald splashes to Freyja’s side. “You _madwoman_ ,” he barks, when he sees that she’s conscious.

Freyja groans again and drops her head back into the chilly water. She’s already soaked to the skin, anyway. “My heroes,” she chuckles, and then grabs her side and resolves not to do so again.

“Are you hurt?” Eitri says, dropping to his knees in the mud, already reaching for her. Freyja moves gingerly, taking stock. Probes at her ribs. They feel bruised, not broken. “I don’t think so,” she says, and he seizes her under the arms and hauls her to her feet, perhaps more brusquely than he means to. Freyja sways a little, clutching his shoulder. Thorald, she notes gratefully, has collected her sword and shield. Moving to take them, she shifts weight to her left ankle and hisses. Eitri takes a firmer grip on her arm. “What is it?”

“It’s all right,” Freyja says, shrugging him off. “It isn’t bad, I can make it to W—”

Her ankle crumples beneath her. Freyja curses helplessly as Eitri catches her under the arms and draws her against his chest, looking white. She spits another curse, for emphasis. This is why she always carries a few healing potions. Naturally, when she doesn’t have a single one on hand, she’d be drawn into a fight with a divines-forsaken _dragon_. “What is it?” Eitri insists.

“It’s just my ankle,” Freyja says, through gritted teeth. “I don’t think it’s broken, it just – ugh – it won’t take my weight. Sprained, maybe.”

“It’s only a few miles to Whiterun,” says Thorald, decisive. He claps Eitri on the shoulder. “If you start now you can make the city before it gets dark. Slow going, but you might borrow a horse or a cart at one of the farms.”

His jaw is set stubbornly. Freyja bites her lip, looking at him. This isn’t how she imagined the three of them parting. “Thorald—” says Eitri.

“Do one thing for me, would you,” Thorald says. “Make sure my family knows that I’m alive. That I love them. And tell my mother—” his eye follows a speck of tundra cotton on the breeze. “Tell her to suffer the winter’s cold wind, for it bears aloft next summer’s seeds. She’ll understand.”

“Of course,” Freyja murmurs. She reaches out to take his hand, only for Thorald to pull her into a bone-crushing hug. “Thank you,” he murmurs, gruffly. “Both of you. I would never have seen the light of day, otherwise.”

“Take care of yourself.”

“Don’t get eaten by a dragon,” Thorald counters.

He hugs Eitri as well, slaps him on the back, mutters something in his ear that makes the other man color and duck his head, smiling faintly. “Be careful,” Eitri says, voice rough.

“Don’t worry,” says Thorald. “Maybe one day I’ll see you both in Windhelm, no?”

“You’ll see us before that,” Freyja tells him. “We’ll take that mountain road to Ivarstead, don’t forget.”

“Not if you don’t make it to Arcadia’s in time for a potion to do you some good, you won’t. Get going. Won’t do to be laid up when you’ve got a mountain to climb.”

It’s hard to argue with that. Thorald helps them transfer the essentials in Freyja’s pack to Eitri’s, lashing her sword and shield to the outside so they won’t trip her up. With one of her arms slung across Eitri’s shoulders and one across Thorald’s they walk up the riverbed, to a place where the bank slopes gently enough that the two men can help her climb out. Then Thorald gives them a brave little smile and makes for the ford, while they set off at a hobble across the tundra. Freyja can’t help craning her neck to watch him go, though it throws her off balance. Several times she catches Eitri doing the same.

“He’ll be all right,” she says, half to herself.

Eitri’s brow furrows. “Do you think so?”

Freyja considers, serious. “Yeah, I do,” she finally says. “He’s a strong man, to have made it through what he has. And it’s only been a few weeks. He’ll get better.”

Eitri still looks troubled. “Are you sure you want to come with me?” Freyja asks, voice low.

“Aye,” he says, uncharacteristically gruff.

“I’d understand, if you didn’t.”

“I said I did.” His breath is as short as his answer, labored with the effort of half-carrying her and all their essential supplies, so Freyja lets the matter drop.

By the time they pass the Whiterun stables, just outside the city’s first gate, the walls are casting long shadows and the yellow tundra grass is glowing red. Freyja’s whole being aches. It strikes her that when the Greybeards called she was in precisely the same position, trudging back to the city in the evening light after a harrowing fight with a dragon. Now here she is months later, come full circle. Preparing to start for High Hrothgar, as she was summoned to do in the first place. As if to complete the picture, when they turn the last corner Irileth comes bulling through the gates with a fleet of the city guard in tow, accompanied by a red-faced farmer who looks to have run all the way from Whiterun’s outskirts. “It came down from the mountains and landed by the river,” he babbles. “Didn’t wait to see any more, just ran for the walls. I don’t—”

“Right, men,” Irileth barks, cutting him off. “We don’t know much about these dragons, but we do know we can kill them. You’ve been training for this for months. When we reach the river, spread out, find any cover you can. I want every man who can shoot aiming for the wings to bring it down. Once it’s grounded—”

“It’s dead,” Freyja says, quietly.

The housecarl arrests herself mid-stride, eyes lighting on Freyja with the professional speed of a bodyguard who spends her days assessing threats. When recognition dawns Irileth’s mouth sets in a hard, unreadable little line. “You,” she says.

Freyja shifts more of her weight onto Eitri, in an effort to stand a little straighter. “Me.”

The other woman looks her up and down, measuring. Her dark eyes are expressionless, but there is a tiny frown line between her brows. Freyja recalls her skepticism about _mythical Dragonborns_ , and wonders if she is reassessing now. After a moment she purses her lips. “Are you sure?”

“Nothing left but bones.”

“Well then,” says the houscarl, almost to herself. Shoots a glance back to her men. “Look lively – we’ll check it out and report to the jarl. Keep your eyes open and your weapons ready. For all we know, there may be more.”

“She’s cheerful,” Eitri mutters, as they limp through the city gates. Freyja laughs again, and regrets it. Again. “She’s good at her job,” she says, breathlessly. “Devoted to Jarl Balgruuf. She drew a sword on me when I first walked into the keep with the news from Helgen.”

His eyes widen, shocked. “You were at Helgen?”

“I forgot I never told you that part of the story,” she murmurs. “But yes. Not long after I crossed the mountains I practically walked into a Legion prisoner caravan, and with my luck it happened to have the tightest security this side of the border with Alinor. Some loudmouth on one of the carts chose that moment to blab about _Ulfric Stormcloak, the true High King_ , and suddenly that security was compromised.”

“The Legion took you captive for that?”

“I wasn’t thrilled either.” Freyja’s smile is wry. “Looking back I think they only intended to hold me until I was no longer a liability, but I was – ah – argumentative.” She hadn’t realized the gravity of her situation until she was facing the block. In Cyrodiil legionnaires were keepers of the peace, upholders of strict but strictly fair Imperial justice. Nowhere in Tamriel is the concept of a fair trial more enshrined than in the heartland, and no entity in Cyrodiil is more obsessed with regulation than the Legion; there is even (to the amusement of anyone with a sense of humor and the consternation, no doubt, of the Elder Council) a written code governing how to conduct a legal military coup. Freyja, accustomed to life in Cyrodiil, was violently incensed at being detained without just cause. But this was Skyrim, and not the Skyrim of her youth. Martial law was in effect. It did not occur to her, until she saw the depth of resentment on the Imperial captain’s face, that most of these legionnaires had spent months far from home in a cold, harsh land, engaged in partisan warfare with an enemy that looked and spoke and argued exactly like she did. Freyja’s every angry protest only made her more suspicious. “At any rate,” she says, “I had an excellent view of the first dragon in centuries with my head on the block.”

Eitri looks her up and down as though assuring himself that her neck is still in one piece. Shaking his head, he takes a firmer grip under her arm and practically drags her up the street to the apothecary. A bell jingles cheerfully as they barge through the door. Arcadia looks up from her counter, where she is tying bunches of dried lavender – the kind Whiterun citizens place in linen drawers or weave into broom heads, so the house will smell fresh on washing day. “Oh, dear,” says the alchemist.

“Are you a healer?” Eitri asks, coming straight to the point.

“Of a sort.” The woman scurries out from behind her herbs. “But if you’ve broken an ankle, you need to see the priestess of Kynareth. A potion will do you more harm than good if the bones aren’t set right.”

“It’s only sprained,” huffs Freyja. “I think.”

The woman makes her takes off her boot – not an enjoyable experience – and after a lot of humming and prodding, she agrees. Freyja makes a face at the earthy, herbal taste of the healing potion, and at the necessity of dipping into their meager supply of septims. But as she rests on a stool she can feel the uncomfortable prickling that means the healing is working, and ten minutes later she can stand on her own two feet, though she’s still sore. Impatiently, Freyja shakes off Eitri’s steadying hand and strides out the door, intent on delivering Thorald’s message and getting some dinner. In the market the vendors are packing away their wares, some throwing oilcloth covers over their stalls to keep them dry. At the produce stand a little Imperial girl is busily gathering the leathery apples and bruised gourds of day’s end, but she’s the only one truly focused on her work. Everyone else seems to be listening with half an ear to the furious whispering taking place in front of the jewelry stall, where Fralia Grey-Mane herself is shaking a bony finger under the nose of a nobleman leaning against her counter.

“Foolish old woman!” he suddenly bellows, and turns in profile. His hair’s gone iron-grey, but there’s no mistaking the tones of Olfrid Battle-Born. “You know nothing of our struggles, our suffering!”

“And what of my Thorald?” she fires back – fiercely, though her voice quavers. Freyja feels Eitri tense beside her. “Is he nothing? So don’t talk to me about suffering!”

The warrior beside Olfrid has his father's nose, and there’s no mistaking where his loyalties lie; he wears the uniform of the Imperial Legion openly, with a quartermaster’s insignia on his chest. Freyja supposes that’s why Balgruuf allowed him in, in spite of the jarl’s professed neutrality. As the breadbasket and trading hub of Skyrim, Whiterun is making a profit from both sides. “Your son chose his side, and he chose poorly. And now he’s gone. Such is the way of war.” The legionnaire’s voice is stiff. “The sooner you accept his loss, the better.”

Fralia lifts her chin. “I will _never_ accept his death. My son still lives. I feel it in my heart. So tell me, Battle-Borns, where is he? Where are you holding my Thorald?”

“Do you believe this old hag?” Olfrid asks his son – Idolaf, Freyja remembers. “ _Holding_ him? Why, I’ve got him in my cellar. He’s my prisoner. Face it, cow! Your stupid son is dead! He died a Stormcloak traitor. And you – you’d best keep your mouth shut before you suffer the same.”

“Come on, father,” Idolaf says, looking embarrassed now. Every eye in the market is turned on them. “There’s nothing more to be said here.” Olfrid spits pointedly in the dust and stalks away, grumbling. Idolaf opens his mouth as though to speak, but then he appears to think better of it and follows his father, shoulders back as though he’s on a parade ground. A hush descends on the square.

“Who in Oblivion are they?” barks Eitri, sounding indignant. Freyja starts to explain, but Fralia Grey-Mane overhears him, and speaks first.

“That’s the Battle-Born clan,” she sighs. “Got rich trading with Cyrodiil, and now they think they’re too good for us simple Nord folk. But I shouldn’t speak ill of my neighbors.” The vicious look she shoots at Olfrid’s back undermines her words, and makes it clear that she’s plenty more to say.

Freyja’s mind is on the Thalmor orders stuffed deep in her pack, on the sketchy physical description they contain – _Nord female, light-haired and heavily freckled_. She doesn’t want her name associated with Thorald’s escape in any way. She ought to burn the damned orders the first chance she gets. There are a lot of blonde Nords in the province, but Whiterun is one of the few places in Skyrim where she’s recognized, and market vendors gossip. Here, though, is her opportunity. “You said something about your son?” Freyja asks, quietly.

The old woman’s face fractures along a thousand tiny fault lines, like a Colovian fresco. “Aye,” she says, sounding small now. “My Thorald left to fight with the Stormcloaks, but he’s been missing these three months. Captured by the Legion and he just – disappeared. Everyone says he’s dead, but I know in my heart that my son is alive. Those Battle-Borns, they know it too. Yet they lie to my very face!”

“How do you know that they’re lying?”

“Idolaf grew up with my boys,” she says, more softly. “And he can’t look me in the eye, any more than he could when they snatched my snowberry tarts from the sill.”

Eitri opens his mouth to speak, but Freyja cuts him off. “Maybe we could help,” she says.

Fralia looks like she could cry with gratitude, but she gathers herself quickly. With a glance around, she scoops the last few pieces of jewelry into a basket looped over her arm. “Come with me,” she murmurs.

The instant the door to House Grey-Mane closes behind them, Eitri speaks. “We have a message from your son.”

“You’ve seen Thorald?” gasps Fralia. “Where is he? Is he all right?”

Freyja hears the telltale clink of steel before the bedroom door opens. Even so, she’s unprepared for the burly warrior who bursts into the room, battleaxe already drawn. Swiftly she scrambles back, ripping her sword from its sheath, and puts the firepit between herself and the gleaming double-bladed axe head. “Avulstein!” barks Fralia, in the tones of a Legion drillmaster – or a mother. Freyja remembers the name of the eldest Grey-Mane sibling, but even if she didn’t, it would be all too clear who she’s facing. Though his cheeks are fuller, unstamped by the gaunt lines of captivity, he looks so much like Thorald that he can only be his brother. “What are you thinking, mother? Who is this?” the man hisses.

“Please!” cries Lady Grey-Mane. “Put down your blades – they’re here to help!”

“And how do we know they aren’t Battle-Born spies? This was foolish! If they find me here—”

“I don’t care a silver septim about your damned clan-feud,” Freyja says, temper getting the better of her. She has traveled halfway across Skyrim, killed Thalmor assassins, and fought a giant flying lizard to deliver this message, and now she wants strong mead and a soft bed, not another fight. “Thorald sent us to—”

“She’s lying,” Avulstein growls.

“She’s not,” Eitri counters. The other man tightens his grip on the axe.

“Avulstein Grey-Mane,” Fralia says, quiet but steely. “You are under _my roof_ – as are they. I invited them here, and I won’t have weapons drawn on guests in my home. _Put it away_.”

He does, looking shame-faced, although his anxiety is still evident in his clenched fists and the way he shifts his weight from foot to foot. He’s afraid, Freyja realizes. She wonders what he is doing in Whiterun. Even visiting his family is a risk, when he could be grabbed by a Legion patrol as soon as he sets foot outside the gates. “Fine,” says Avulstein. “You say you’ve seen my brother? Let’s hear it. Where is he, and why did he disappear from the Legion’s prisoner records?”

Freyja hesitates. It’s a lot to explain, especially to a worried mother. “Have you ever heard of Northwatch Keep?” she finally asks.

Lady Grey-Mane shakes her head, but Avulstein immediately looks so appalled that he forgets to be suspicious. “The Thalmor?” he gasps. Closes his eyes, steeling himself. “That’s worse than – oh, gods. At least we know where to hit them.” Fralia doesn’t speak, but her face has gone parchment-white.

Freyja shakes her head. “You don’t—”

“He’s my brother!” the man shouts, and no longer in a mock-whisper. Sinks down onto a wooden bench. “He’s my little brother.”

“Your brother’s alive,” Eitri says. His voice wavers slightly. Freyja glances up, sees a flash of raw envy and grief cross his face before his jaw works and the expression disappears. “That’s what she’s trying to tell you, if you’d listen.”

“How can you possibly—”

“Because we broke him out of Northwatch Keep three weeks ago,” says Freyja. “He's at a hidden pass near the road to Eastmarch, a few miles above White River Gorge - he didn't think it was safe for him inside the city walls."

Avulstein springs up, his face crumpling in relief, but this time it's Lady Grey-Mane who interrupts. "Wait," she says, putting a hand on her son's shoulder. Her kindly, wrinkled face is hard as she turns to Freyja. "How do I know that you aren't just telling me what I want to hear? That this isn't a trap to steal my other son from me?"

"Thorald said tell you to suffer the winter's chill," Freyja says, "for it--"

"-- _bears aloft next summer's seeds_ ," Fralia finishes. The expression on her face is indescribable. "That's my boy. That's Thorald. Go to him, Avulstein."

He hesitates. "We can't come back, you know. Not until this war is over. I took a risk, this time, but—”

"Go," she says, kissing him. It makes an odd picture, the tiny old woman lifting herself on tiptoe to smooth back her big burly son's hair and press her papery lips to his cheek, the way she must have when she tucked him in as a boy. “Your father can get you out of the city, same way he got you in. Tell your brother that I love him - enough to know that an old woman travelling out to meet him will only attract attention. Take care of each other."

"Of course," says Avulstein, gruffly. He pulls a cloak from a peg, tugs the hood up to hide his face, and slips out.

The proud smile she wears for her son flashes briefly into pain when the door closes behind him, but Fralia Grey-Mane takes a shaky breath and steadies herself, graceful as a queen. "And you," she says, turning. "How can I ever repay you?"

"There's no need," Freyja mutters. "We couldn't leave him there, once we found him. It was the only decent thing."

"You've given me back my son," the woman insists. With a sudden determined purse of her lips, she marches into the bedroom where Avulstein was hidden. Freyja watches her pull a sword down from a plaque above the bed. “Eorlund made this,” she murmurs, returning. “As a...well. He told me to mourn and accept our son’s death. But then he spent weeks forging this sword, and he wouldn’t hear of selling it.” Gently, she presses the weapon into Freyja’s palms.

Freyja weighs the blade in her hands; it's solid, balanced, alive with a cold red gleam. Skyforge steel. The weapon almost hums in her grip, guarding an inner light, like a coal eager to leap into flame. "I can't take this," she gasps. "This is your _son's_ , this is--" _priceless_. The sword is enchanted – and in the old Atmoran fashion, with runes glowing dully near the guard, not etched but worked into the metal itself. Less potent than a spell woven with soul gems, but it will last for a lifetime. The art of runic enchanting is nearly a lost one. There are two or three smiths in Tamriel who can do it, perhaps even fewer. Freyja is no merchant appraiser, but she knows swords – and this one is probably worth more than the house they are standing in, and everything it contains.

"Eorlund can forge him another, when this war is over," Fralia says. Freyja does not miss the woman's uncertainty, the breath of fear when she speaks of an end as yet unglimpsed, an end neither of her sons is guaranteed to see. "You should have it, dear. You've proven you'll use it well. Your parents would be very proud of you, Freyja."

Freyja looks up, surprised. "I'm not so old that I can't remember faces, child," Fralia says, smiling. "You and my Olfina used to get into such mischief. Don't think I don't remember the captain of the guard dragging you in by your ears with the word that you'd dropped a bird's egg on his head - from the roof of Dragonsreach, no less."

Freyja laughs, short and startled. " _I'd_ forgotten that, truth be told."

"You should see her, before you go," Lady Grey-Mane says. "She'll want to hear her brother's safe, and she's missed you since you left all those years ago. This war's been hard on her."

"I'd like that," Freyja says, and finds that it's true. She's almost forgotten what it is to have a childhood confidante just a stroll away.

"You'll see her tonight, if you room at the Bannered Mare," the woman says. "Though you're welcome to stay here. We're simple folk, but we've meat and mead and a spare bedroom now Avulstein's gone. It's the least we could do, truly.” She turns to Eitri. "And you, young man - I owe you a debt as well."

"Introduce me to the man who forged that weapon," he says low and fervent, "and I'll consider it paid."

"It's settled, then," Fralia says. "You'll stay for dinner at least, if you won't spend the night." She smiles. "And Eorlund will be polite if it kills him."

 

* * *

 

Some three hours later they push through the door of the Bannered Mare. The tavern is rich with the smells of roast goat and woodsmoke and mead, but their stomachs are full of Fralia Grey-Mane’s venison stew, and Freyja shoulders her way to the counter merely to buy a room for the night.

“I’ve only got the one above the common room left,” says the innkeep. “Bit noisy up there, I’m afraid, but there’s a nice little balcony, and the bathhouse is free.” A steam bath sounds like a little piece of heaven – tomorrow. Tonight Freyja just wants to fall into bed; her ankle is still sore, in spite of the healing potion. “Is Olfina Grey-Mane here?” she asks.

“She ran out to chop more firewood,” says the innkeeper, cheerfully. “Loves the fresh air, that girl. Hang on – Jon, won’t you have another mead?” This to one of her patrons, as she sees him rise from the bar out of the corner of her eye.

“Don’t tempt me, Hulda,” he smiles, but hurries out all the same.

“Sorry,” says the innkeeper, turning back to Freyja. “Attic room’s all right, then?”

She pays and they climb the stairs, rid themselves of their armor. Fall onto the bed. Tomorrow they will set off again, to climb Tamriel’s highest mountain in the most treacherous part of the year. But tonight Freyja plans to revel in the warmth and comfort of a tavern, in the familiar sounds and scents. In a meal eaten at table, with people she’s known since childhood. Freyja chuckles to herself as she recalls Eitri’s attempts to rein in his puppyish enthusiasm while seated at famously taciturn Eorlund Grey-Mane’s elbow. Once he’d asked a few of what Eorlund termed _actual intelligent questions_ , even the gruff old smith’s demeanor had thawed a bit. “Only thing that will get him talking,” Fralia had whispered, with a fond eye roll.

Eitri raises a brow at her. “Something funny?”

“You won over Eorlund Grey-Mane,” she says, still chuckling.

Eitri blushes. “I think I made a fool of myself.”

“Oh no, he liked you. He was positively chatty.”

It’s Eitri’s turn to laugh. “Apparently Thorald gets his conversational skills from his ma.”

“And his brother got all of his father’s way with people,” Freyja says, though without heat.

“I hope they’re still there, when we start for Ivarstead.”

“Me too.”

Eitri hesitates. “I’ve been wondering,” he says, voice low. “Why did you never answer the Greybeards, all this time?”

Freyja drums her fingers on the nightstand. “I had my reasons,” she finally says, and then shakes her head, wryly. “Though they don’t seem like very good ones, with winter coming on.” Eitri rests his chin in his hand, brow furrowing, clearly unsatisfied with that answer. Freyja turns away, sitting on the edge of the bed. Draws her new blade out of its sheath. It’s an evasion, but after a moment she falls to admiring the craftsmanship in the light of the candles.

"That's a hero's sword," Eitri observes, resting a hand on her shoulder. Freyja is silent, tilting the edge slowly, watching the way firelight sluices down the fullers. "No one deserves it more, you know." She sheathes it again, carefully, and turns to look at him. Eitri meets her gaze unblinkingly. His eyes are so open that she has to look away.

“That,” he says.

“What?”

“That. What I just said. Why does that frighten you?”

“I am not frightened.”

Eitri looks at her with his deep sad eyes.

In that moment, the bard downstairs strums a single dark, shivering chord, old and well-known. The hum of the common room quiets. Into the lull the man starts to sing, voice accompanied by nothing more than a single plucked string here and there. A song as old as Skyrim itself, long used to rally warriors and bring hope.

_Our hero, our hero claims a warrior’s heart_

_I tell you, I tell you the Dragonborn comes_

_With a voice wielding power of the ancient Nord art_

_Believe, believe the Dragonborn comes._

With a sigh of defeat Freyja falls back onto the bed. Rubs at her temples. “I’m not the person in those songs,” she says.

Eitri chews on his lip. Flexes his hand. "I don't think heroes usually are," he says, slowly.

“I slew a dragon today,” says Freyja, talking over him. “A wounded dragon, half-crippled by a giant. You heard the folk in Dawnstar, talking of Numinex and Olaf One-Eye. Maybe I am Dragonborn, but I’m not that. Subduing a dragon, keeping it in his palace—”

“If any warrior could do it, I’d bet on you.”

“There were a lot of warriors at Helgen,” she says, moodily. “A whole century. The ones who are still alive are the ones who ran away, and that includes me. And then I ran away again, when the Greybeards called. I’m not...” Freyja stops. It’s on the tip of her tongue, the real reason she fears to shoulder this responsibility, only half-acknowledged even to herself.

Eitri regards her for a moment. When she makes no attempt to finish her sentence he speaks. “You know, I’ve always liked the song about King Jorunn.”

“Which one?”

“The one he wrote himself. The one about the sack of Windhelm.”

She knows the song. It’s a sad one, a headlong spill of grief barely contained by the strict metre of skaldic poetry, a structured wail from a man who lost his family, a warrior who arrived too late, a king who gained a throne he never asked for. “Why that one?”

“All those battles. But that’s the one he wrote – the one about failure. About his mother and sister dying in the palace while he was fighting through the streets trying to get to them. Other bards recorded his victories, but that’s the tale of himself he chose to put to song.”

Freyja’s never had much patience for advice couched in story and symbol. “Are you making some kind of point?” she asks, tired.

Eitri shakes his head. Leaning over he nuzzles into her hair, nibbles at the thin skin behind her ear. “Come to bed,” he breathes. “Forget the stupid bard.”

“That’s the boy whose nose I bloodied, actually,” Freyja says. “When I was young – I told you, remember? Because he said girls couldn’t play with wooden swords.”

She feels him smile against her neck. “What does he know, anyway?”

“A hundred ballads. Most of the Edda. The history of Skyrim,” she says, but she’s smiling herself, half-joking now. “Anything worth singing about any hero who’s ever lived.”

"Bards won't sing about this," he says, and kisses her throat. "But I intend to make it worthy of a song."

Heat flares in her belly. “Listen to you,” Freyja chuckles, to cover the sudden flutter of her heartbeat. “Where did a farmboy from Ivarstead learn about seduction?”

He tweaks the skin beneath her ribs. “I’m a blacksmith, not a farmboy.”

She smirks dryly. “My apologies.”

“You ought to laugh more often,” says Eitri – and rolls atop her, pinning her with his size and weight. Abruptly he’s tickling her, clever fingers scurrying up and down both sides of her ribcage; Freyja shouts with indignant laughter and grabs for his hands, but they slip through her grasp. She wriggles, cursing. Eitri grins wickedly at her, so she traps his leg with her own, locks her grip around his wrist, and with a furious surge flips him onto his back to straddle his waist, triumphant.

He doesn’t fight it. His thumbs come to rest over her hipbones, large hands flaring across the dip of her lower back. “Now that’s more like it,” he breathes, rather shamelessly. His palms cup lower.

 _I could fall in love with him,_ Freyja thinks, as their clothes come off. He sees everything so simply. Not because he’s simple, or blind to the world’s complexities. But Eitri has the quiet surety of a man who knows who he is. That clarity is an attractive thing. She looks down into his green eyes, notices the shadow of gold around the pupil. Like a coin glimpsed at the bottom of a lake.

Their lovemaking is different tonight, and not just because it’s the first time they’ve come together in a bed. Their other two couplings were desperate with the hunger that comes of a recent brush with death. But this time Freyja is not looking for an easy way to cool her heated blood or calm her restless mind. She’s just looking for Eitri. She takes her time, searches for those particular spots where the smallest of touches can make his breath hitch. His earlobes are sensitive. A light scrape of nails, in the territory between his navel and his groin, will make him squirm. As she explores he watches her, eyes wide open, palms sliding across every bit of skin that he can reach.

When at last they both slump he catches her, panting, cupping a hand around the back of her skull as she moves to roll away. Freyja whines into the slick skin of his shoulder. His blunt fingers trail drowsily down her spine. “You all right?” he asks, voice already husky with sleep. Freyja nods.

“It’ll be all right,” he mumbles. It occurs to her that his question referred to more than the immediate moment. Freyja swallows back a sudden well of emotion.

“I loved him,” she blurts. It feels obscene to say Indros’ name here, now, and so she doesn’t. Eitri’s perceptive enough to work it out. “And I couldn’t save him. I didn’t even have the chance to try. How am I supposed to save the world?”

As soon as the reckless words are out, Freyja cringes. It’s the wrong sort of honesty, with a new lover still inside her, but it appears Eitri is either too good or too practical to be jealous of a dead man. Silently, he cards his fingers through the hair at the nape of her neck, runs his broad thumb along the rim of her ear. The murmur of the tavern rolls below them like the tides.

“You have the chance to try,” he says.

 

* * *

 

 Morning brings frost. Freyja shivers pleasantly at the contrast as she leaves the small sauna attached to the back of the inn, steam still beading on her skin. After her time away and all the trouble getting back, it’s surreal to be leaving Whiterun again after only one night. But that, she supposes, is the lot of a sellsword – and a Dragonborn. When he finishes his own bath Eitri follows Freyja out the front door of the inn, prepared to join her in bartering for travel supplies. While the sky is pale blue, closer to earth the light is dusky grey. This late in the year the dawn takes a long time to scale the mountains. Still, the weather promises to be fine. It’s one of those rare clear days when the summit of the Throat is visible; the peak gleams red-gold with morning alpenglow, and as the sun finally clears the tops of the eastern mountain ranges it kindles the same flames in Eitri’s hair. The most industrious of the market vendors are already laying out their wares. Freyja takes a long, determined breath. Fastens her eyes on High Hrothgar.

 Eitri puts a muscled arm around her shoulders, smelling of wool and newly clean skin. He smells different, and yet familiar. _Like the Wind District_ , Freyja realizes. She laughs, sudden and clear.

 Eitri smiles at her. “What?”

 “You smell of lavender soap.”

 “Problem?”

 “Not at all,” she tells him. He smells of home.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Confession time: when I first started writing it, the first chapter of this story WAS the story. Then Freyja, Eitri, and Thorald unceremoniously moved into my brain and made themselves at home. The result has been a lot of fun, but has also taught me why I make outlines BEFORE I write. Thanks for sticking with me through the long updates. F+E's story will continue, but there will be a break so that I can get my thoughts in order before writing this time around (and, hopefully, work on a few things that have been on the back burner in the meantime).
> 
> The idea of the Imperial Legion having a written contingency plan in case they need to conduct a neat, orderly military coup is shamelessly stolen (with gracious permission) from Morninglight. If you haven't read her Skyrim fics, YOU SHOULD.


End file.
